Furry Writers' Guild

Oxfurred Comma Is Comming Soon!

You’ve been hearing about Oxfurred Comma, but now we have all the details! Oxfurred Comma, an online anthropomorphic literature convention, will be taking place on October 17th-18th. We’ll be talking a bit about the convention here, and full details can be found on the Oxfurred Comma Website.

Convention panels will be streamed live on the official FWG Twitch account. We will also be hosting special chats and dealer’s den rooms on the FWG Discord. We have several features, panels, and events to consider submitting to including:

• Panel Submission Form Deadline: October 7th
• Dealer’s Den Form Deadline: October 7th
• Author’s Corner Form Deadline: October 7th
• Flash Fiction Contest Deadline: October 13th
• Slam Poetry Reading Signups Deadline: October 15th

We hope to see many signups for our events, panels, and features. Please be sure to share this with all of your friends, fans of furry fiction, and any other furry you think might be interested. It’s up to us authors to help promote this big event, be sure to do your part. We look forward to seeing you all at the event!

Welcome back for another FWG Interview! Today’s interview discusses adult content, so those that avoid things relating to erotic content or may be sex averse consider this your content warning before we continue.

Patreon has been cracking down on adult content which could directly affect income streams for furry writers. To help explain the situation and help writers prepare, we interviewed an expert on the subject: FWG member Ana Valens! Not only has she done a lot of reporting on the subject, but she’s also written many reports for mainstream media on the furry community while being a furry herself.

We sat down to discuss these changes to Patreon, her reporting, and her history with the furry community. Enough with the introductions, let’s get to the interview!

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FWG: For those that might not know you, tell everyone a little about yourself.

Ana: Hello! Thank you so, so much for having me. My name is Ana Valens. I’m an NSFW reporter for the Daily Dot, a sex worker, an adult content creator, a leatherdyke, and, of course, a furry. I’m also a trans lesbian (she/her pronouns). That’s a lot of identities!

I first started writing professionally around 2012, but I really started to build a career for myself in 2014 when I started writing an LGBTQ column for a friend’s gaming site. In 2017, the Daily Dot brought me on as a freelancer, and it was there that I started to really write the hard-hitting stories about sex, gender, gaming, and trans rights. That’s also where the lion’s share of my reporting on the furry community began, including my piece on Bad Dragon, my guide to fursuits, my vore and giantess porn articles, my explanation on yiffing, etc etc etc.

FWG: What do you think makes a good story?

Ana: I have two answers to this as a fiction writer and a journalist!

For fiction, the most important thing is to create characters that readers care about. They don’t have to be similar to the reader (although I’m a huge advocate of this as a queer writer), but above all, what characters do, say, and feel need to make sense and have some sort of consistent logic, even if it appears illogical at first. I don’t believe good fiction comes from conflict (there are a lot of bad stories with good conflicts and a lot of beautiful stories with no conflict), but rather bringing characters together and seeing how they relate, interact, and grow (or don’t grow). This can be as simple as a main character understanding the world around them, or as complicated as, say, thee political drama between furry monarchs, dukes, and generals in a fantasy world under a scalie invasion. Conflict or not, characters have to have feelings that are understandable and relatable, feelings that flourish through storytelling. Achieve that, and the rest will follow.

As for journalism, a good story has to be newsworthy – that is, it has to speak to some sort of pressing issue or current event that others should know about. A lot of my furry coverage written by and for the furry community discusses issues they should know more about to make informed decisions as community members. Two good examples are my Bad Dragon story and my Mastodon story. My introductory guides to furry topics are technically for those outside the furry community, but they’re still for the community in the sense that they’re resources we can use to help educate non-furs.

In both of these cases, I believe what happens to the furry community both internally and externally is important, and it’s why I cover our community so passionately: because being a furry matters, and what happens to us matters. If you walk in to a furry story with that mindset, you’re halfway to a good story.

FWG: You have written several articles discussing furry topics from the history and issues of Bad Dragon to discussing the dfferences between mursuits and fursuits. What first inspired you to start reporting on furries?

Ana: Ahh, great question. The furry community’s history is so tightly connected with the internet, so as an internet-based reporter, the fandom has always interested me. But the thing that really turned me on to covering the furry community was the queer visual novel Anthrotari, which I wrote about for Kill Screen back in 2016. Anthrotari is an adorable game about the ‘90s queer furry IRC world, and it touches on everything from online connection amid offline isolation to the sort of playful, erotic energy that flowed (and still flows) through queer furry spaces. Just a few months earlier, I had covered Jae Bearhat and Rory Frances’ Little Teeth for Bitch Media, which I adored for its handling on the messiness of queer community (which, by the way, really came through in the full release). Anthrotari spoke to a lot of the same issues around queer belonging that made me gravitate toward Little Teeth in the first place, and so both titles planted that initial interest within me.

But my passion for covering the furry community really came out when I started learning more about the furry world and meeting other furs. So around late 2018 and 2019? I felt an innate sense of belonging among trans feminine furries in particular, like they understood and accepted me. That’s partly because I’m a leatherdyke, and there’s just this feeling of connection that comes between leather and queer furry spaces: we’re “others” ostracized both for our hobbies and interests as well as our systemically marginalized identities. One thing led to another, and well, here I am today!

FWG: Part of why you became a furry yourself was because of the reporting you did on the community. Can you tell us that story and a bit about your fursona?

Ana: I’m a ‘90s kid (‘94 to be exact) who grew up with the internet and knew about the furry community from a very, very young age. Unfortunately, I first learned about furries through anti-furry sentiment on sites like 4chan, Encylcopedia Dramatica, etc. The biggest and earliest “resource” for me was God Hates Furries, which popped up in 2001 and became a well-known anti-furry site during the 2000s. I must’ve stumbled across that site when I was 10 or 11, maybe? And as an impressionable kid struggling with a fuckton of internalized homophobia and transphobia, I believed God Hates Furries – for a time.

That changed dramatically as I started coming out as queer and meeting queer furs in 2015 and 2016. The furries I met were more often than not wonderful, accepting, and non-judgmental people. Reading Little Teeth in 2016 really opened my eyes to how there are many different ways to be a furry, including incredibly queer and political ways, but also aesthetic ones too. I’m far more a fan of Rory Frances’ style than the traditional funny-animals and Don Bluth-esque looks popular during the ‘90s and early 2000s.

So by the time I really started dipping my toe into furry subculture (2019) I had a lot of furry followers who became furry friends, and I fell in love with what I saw in the modern furry fandom: queer inclusion, sexual freedom, plurality in furry aesthetics, creativity and autonomous self-expression, so many other things. I came out proper as a furry this past January, and when quarantine started, I became very close with a number of lovely, wonderful queer and trans furries who really kept me going and gave me social connection when I was at the most risk of isolating myself from others. The furry community still has its problems for sure, but I think many parts of the furry fandom are lovely places to express onself. I certainly feel right at home in the little community I’ve carved out for myself.

As for how I came into creating my own fursona. My friend campmonday does a lot of furry artwork, and I fell in love with a doe girl they created in 2019. Their doe reminded me a lot of myself in certain ways, so I reached out to monday about commissioning a doe girl fursona design for myself. One thing led to another, and that spring, I had my first official fursona.

She’s supposed to be a reflection of myself down to a T: she’s not an idealized version of myself, but more like what I would be like if I was in an anthropomorphic cartoon or comic (Little Teeth? haha), flaws and all. I adore her and the design monday did, it still feels like such a fantastic representation of who I am IRL.

FWG: What is it like not only doing standard reporting but navigating that while doing sex work and creating queer adult content?

Ana: Ooh, great question. It’s as exciting as it is challenging. There are many sex workers in media, but there aren’t many that are out and open about doing sex work. The ones that are out are generally the exception over the rule. Our identities are fluid, too. There are many folks who come out only to withdraw their disclosure for their own safety or privacy. There’s no right way to be a sex worker with a public-facing civilian job, just many different ways to do it, but being bluntly out and open about it is… quite a lot to navigate.

As for the specifics of being a sex worker and an adult creator, it requires strong boundaries between your sex work, your personal life, and your civilian job(s). There’s a lot of threat modeling involved too. Every day I have to ask myself questions like, “what happens if my OnlyFans nudes leak? What happens if harassers find my sex work accounts?” I don’t think I would have come out as a sex worker if I didn’t already have a strong, stable career that could withstand whorephobia from within and without the editorial industry. Games in particular is really bad about this.

FWG: Quite a few furries write for independant news websites strictly about furry news or book reviews. Do you have any suggestions on how to pitch ideas for these sorts of articles to mainstream publications for anyone wanting to branch out?

Ana: Yes! First off, by writing about the furry community independently (whether for an indie publication, Medium, Substack, or even Dreamwidth and Tumblr), you’ve already fought half the battle: building your portfolio. This gives you a strong advantage when pitching publications because you have examples of your writing in action, and, hopefully, proof that you have a trustworthy voice within the community you want to write about (or at least discuss).

Beyond that, do some research into the different publications out there and whether they have prior furry or online subculture coverage. Then, pitch to places that are friendly to new voices: write a 300 to 400 word email to the submission editor detailing your past work, what you want to cover, and why it matters. On the queer and feminist side of things, Bitch Media, Autostraddle, and, of course, Daily Dot are all great picks. In terms of geekdom and gaming coverage that converges with the furry world, Fanbyte, Unwinnable, and Gayming Magazine are all friendly to new voices and pay decent rates as well.

FWG: Let’s move on to our main topic. It’s no secret that there are many erotica writers in the furry fandom. Plenty of these writers use Patreon to help get paid for their writing within the furry community.

Patreon has recently begun to crack down on adult content, even content posted to other websites. You have been reporting on these changes as they happen. Can you discuss why Patreon is doing this?

Ana: I used to believe Patreon’s recent censorship wave all came down to credit card companies and banks dictating what kind of content can be posted where and when on Patreon. I still think that’s the biggest contributing factor, but I don’t think that’s the sole explanation. There are high-risk payment processors out there that Patreon could have partnered with, but chooses not to. And if Patreon really cared, it would find ways to make room for the kind of content it’s now banning, just as it would have found ways to make room for the sex workers it deplatformed.

As Veil Machines’ E-Viction pinpoints so well, Patreon is engaging in something called digital gentrification: The site became popular because it provided adult content creators and sex workers with an avenue to collect money without a middle-man (i.e. a publisher, a studio) facilitating the exchange. Patreon now wants to change its image and branding so it’s influencer-friendly, so it’s cleaning out the porn and remaining sex workers. Now, YouTubers squeamish around hypno smut and murrsuits don’t have to feel uncomfortable using the site! Hooray! /s

TL;DR: Patreon is facing external pressure from its payment processors, but it’s also trying to change its target demographic, so they’re engaging in the same cruel cycle that happens all the time in Silicon Valley: a new start-up says sex workers and adult creators are welcome, raises investment money off our backs, becomes stable enough to no longer require us, spits us out, and invites in a more “respectable” crowd.

FWG: Some might be worried that getting their customers to move off Patreon, where they are already comfortable, might result in a serious loss of support. What can authors do to protect their sources of income through this?

While Patreon is the most popular, should furry writers consider switching to a different platform now to save time building a base there?

Ana: The sad reality is that we don’t know what’s going to happen next. I think Patreon will continue slowly picking its battles by carefully censoring and deplatforming the folks it knows it can get away with censoring and deplatforming: fetish creators, kinky erotica writers, adult artists doing anime content, furry porn writers and artists, etc. If it’s non-normative smut and likely to squick out a random person on the street, it’s a target.

Furry writers on Patreon should book a day to audit their online presence and figure out which platforms are the most important to them financially and socially. Then, use that report to create a backup plan that prepares you for the worst. If you rely on Patreon for most of your income, and if it’s the sole way you communicatee with the majority of your fans, start to branch out and monetize your base elsewhere. Twitter is a hot mess, but it’s where most people are these days, so I highly recommend hopping on there to start. Consider creating a Discord server and inviting your patrons and non-patrons alike to it: that way you can engage in direct communication with your fans and even create monetization solutions via your server. I don’t think it hurts to create a SubscribeStar right now either, although I would continue monetizing your content on Patreon for as long as you can to prevent potential income loss.

One closing thought: When the Tumblr NSFW purge hit, artists and writers that already had a strong following off-site on Patreon, Discord, Twitter, Mastodon instances, etc were in a much better position than those who did not. The key right now is to see where your target demographic hangs out and plant your feet there. But I wouldn’t run away from Patreon quite yet, because the purge process is still very slow: it’s better to be prepared than to uproot suddenly.

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We would like to thank Ana once more for sitting down to talk with us! You can keep up with her and her work by following her on Twitter (NSFW). You can also check out her creative writing by checking out her trans lesbian BDSM erotic game Blood Pact on itch.io. We hope this interview was as informative as it was entertaining! Until next time, may your words flow like water.

Welcome to another FWG interview! On Twitter we got requests to interview both publishers and editors, so today we decided to do just that. Today we’ll be sharing an interview with Weasel, owner of Weasel Press, and an experienced editor and writer within the furry fandom. Enough with the introductions, let’s get to the interview!

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FWG: For those that might not know you, tell everyone a bit about yourself.

Weasel: My name is Izzy, though most people know me as Weasel. I’ve been a writer for so many years, I’ve already forgotten, and a publisher for about 8 years. I’m a queer, biracial latinx author, and I’m the owner of Weasel Press/Red Ferret Press/Sinister Stoat Press. It’s been a long few years, haha!

FWG: What do you think makes a good story?

Weasel: That’s a tough one. Characters. They’re the backbone of your story. Worldbuilding can happen at any point, but if you got weak characters, characters who are problematic, your story is going to fall apart. It just will.

I also think representation matters. As a queer Latinx reader, it’s a hard blow when I pick up a book and the characters are coded as straight, cisgender, and white. People of color exist in this world, we deserve to be in media as much as white people are.

The moment I see a book that is white and heteronormative, I’m not as interested.

Make strong characters. Be diverse.

FWG: As you mentioned, you do publishing within the furry fandom. What got you into the publishing scene, and what made you want to become a publisher?

Weasel: You’re asking me to go way back! So, I got into publishing after working with my community college’s art journal. I wanted to do something like it, so I started Vagabonds: Anthology of the Mad ones. I released the first issue of that journal in 2012, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel like 2012 every time I look at it.

I did about 3 issues before starting Weasel Press. I had an author ask me if I was ever interested in putting out single-author books and I was like “man, lemme think on it.”

And well, here I am, 70-somethin’ books later.

FWG: You publish some non-furry things at Weasel press, so what drew you into a more niche publishing scene like in furry?

Weasel: The first book we published was Furry. Ribbon and Leviathan by Manna Plourde. I’ve been a furry for years. The exact number I don’t even know, but it’s been a time.

I didn’t know what I wanted to publish when I first started. I knew I wanted furry, I wanted beat generation style work, and I wanted works that were sex-positive.

About 20% of the books we publisher are furry, and I’d like to do more. It’s a touch difficult to do from a funding perspective, but there are ideas that I hope to implement someday.

FWG: You publish a lot more poetry than other publishers within the fandom. Can you talk about that a bit?

Weasel: Poetry is a big thing for me. Poetry is a way of processing. For me, it’s processing trauma. So publishing poetry was more so second nature for me. It’s like “of course, I’m going to publish poetry. ”

I think we have some of the coolest poetry projects on the net right now. Only 2 of those projects are furry, but each book I have is unique and tackles something personal to the author. We publish books on domestic violence, environmental issues, drug addiction, sex, experiences from people of color, trans experiences.

If you’ve not checked out a poetry book from us, you’re missing out, because we have some really gut-punching titles.

FWG: Weasel Press always seems to be an outlet for diverse voices to express themselves. As of May 2020, Weasel press is only accepting works from authors of color,  authors who identify as LGBTQ+, authors with disabilities, and current and former sex workers. Can you talk about why you decided to go that route?

Weasel: I did it because I’m tired of seeing marginalized voices not having a platform. I did it because for a period I was getting submissions from old, straight, white guys. How many of them get published? A lot. And that ain’t what I want anymore. For anyone who has had a book with weasel press in the past, sure I’ll work with you. But new folks? Nah. I’m good.

We need more people of color. We need more queer people. Authors with disabilities. Current and former sex workers. Where are their voices in publishing? For a long time, all I heard was crickets on that front. And I’m tired.

I’m tired because any book I pick up is from a white perspective and that perspective ain’t always for me. it ain’t always for people of color. White people write for white people.

So I made some changes. If you’re a queer author, I want your work. If you’re an author of color, send it my way asap. If you’re an author with a disability, we need your voice. And if you’re a current or former sex worker, we want to work with you.

Representation matters. It took me so many years to realize that. Other publishers should do better, and I don’t want to hear the excuse of “well they just don’t submit to us.” That’s called laziness. Don’t bring that to my table.

FWG: When these diverse writers send you their works, what can they do to help them stand out? What makes a good query to you?

Weasel: That’s a hard question for me. I get so many good queries we can’t take due to our line up being full or our funding just isn’t there. Ultimately, I want works that are real though. I tell every author, be real, be you.

Don’t send me something you think will sell. Give me something you wrote, that has your voice and needs to get out. Give me your fantasy novel that’s been queered up, or give me your horror book from a non-white perspective.

If you’re writing it, love what you’re writing. If you don’t love it, I don’t want it.

FWG: What do you wish more authors knew about the challenges of getting books out and published?

Weasel: So much. The first thing I wish I knew is the amount of money you receive from sales. I knew it wouldn’t be much, but it’s definitely a lot less than I expected.

Put it this way, Weasel Press made $1000 in sales this month. After printing charges and fees and distribution discounts, we maybe got about $300 of that as actual profit. $300 we didn’t have before, but definitely a jump from what I would have expected.

I wish I would have known how much of my job would be administrative as opposed to production.

And I wish I knew how many death threats I’d get beforehand haha

FWG: You have received death threats due to your publishing work? Are you comfortable discussing this with our readers?

Weasel: I’ve received my fair share of threats. None were from the fandom. I’ve had old white guys say they would find me and kill me. I’ve been called one racial slur after another. Most of these are just due to rejection. I haven’t gotten any in a few years so it’s gotten better on that front.

FWG: This segues into our next question. What kind of challenges do you find in not only being a publisher that isn’t white but in publishing diverse voices like you do?

Weasel: A lot of the challenges stem from people who don’t follow our guidelines and don’t meet the requirements. There are the people who believe I’m censoring them because I won’t publish their white narratives.

I’ve had people tell me I’m not a real publisher because of who and what I publish. Even members of this fandom have made a passive remark like that.

I know from my perspective, I’ve felt like some see me as second class or low tier.

I know I’ve had some difficulty recruiting diverse voices. But since the shift in our guidelines, it’s been way easier. I think because of how we started, and how we didn’t have our guidelines explicit like we do now, it’s been a challenge to shift our brand the way we want it. It’s getting there though, slowly but surely.

I haven’t had an issue with the voices we do publish, they’ve all been phenomenal to work with. It’s given us a big positive energy boost and I love it.

FWG: You have multiple imprints related to Weasel Press. Can you explain why you chose to go this route over keeping everything under the Weasel Press banner?

Weasel: It’s an organizational thing for me as well as a branding thing. I didn’t know there were some genres I wanted to explore until I received more of it. Like horror, or sex-focused works. With horror, I was able to create that brand, logo, and tailor it to horror. The imprints all function the same as Weasel Press, but I wanted to be able to make it fun, to create an image that says “horror” or “sexually explicit.” it gets tough when genres blend, but Howl and I work it out.

FWG: Outside of publishing, you do also are an editor. What has been your favorite anthology or book that you’ve done editing for so far?

Weasel: I have several. I’ve loved working on all of our books, but if there’s a few that stand out, it’s the titles below (not all of them are furry):

Vagabonds: Anthology of the Mad Ones -This is my baby. I started with this journal, and I can’t let it die. It’s been with me since the beginning and I’ve loved watching it grow each time we put an issue out.

Tales in Liquid Time by Neil S. Reddy – I didn’t know what I was doing at all. But this book was one of our firsts and I look at it so much! We’ve come so far from 2014, but I’ll never forget how fun it was with the strange stories in that book.

#ohmurr! – I can’t not talk about this book. This is such a big moment for me. We blended kink and sex-focused photography with fandom businesses, short fiction, furry experiences, and it was the most fun I’d had in all the years I’ve put out an anthology. Check out #ohmurr! if you’re looking for something different and sex-focused because the magazine is an experience. #justsaying

FWG: Any last thing you want to tell our readers?

Weasel: Don’t let anyone tell you what to write. Write your truth.

—

We would like to thank Weasel once more for answering all of our questions! In lieu of promoting himself, Weasel asked us to promote recent Weasel Press releases. #ohmurr is currently available for purchase and more information can be found on Twitter @ohmurrmag (NSFW). What Makes a Witch, written by Linnea Capps, has also recently released and will have an audiobook coming soon. It is available for purchase here. Until next time, may your words flow like water.

Hello there FWG members, it’s time for another monthly newsletter! We’ll keep the introduction short and get right down to business.

Oxfurred Comma, an online convention for furry literature, will be taking place from October 17th to 18th in conjunction with Furry Book Month. We’ll have forms to fill out for those interested in hosting panels as well as participating in our dealer’s den out to you in the next couple of weeks. These will be posted on the FWG Blog and social media.

You do not have to be an FWG member to participate in this convention either. We want to help all anthro writers especially with how this year has hurt sales. Any writers seeing this should be sure to sign up and invite their writing friends!

Outside of this, we have been having internal discussions among FWG officers about potential changes to the requirements for joining the guild. We understand times are changing and many authors are using platforms like Patreon and finding success. We also know other avenues of writing can be distinctly furry, like comics writing or visual novels.

We have opened up discussions on this topic and hope to receive your feedback. These include rough drafts on what new requirements might be. Please keep in mind that forum posts and our Discord channel for FWG feedback will be the easiest ways for us to keep an eye on your comments as Telegram messages can move quickly. Let’s get this discussion started!

As a final note, we would like to remind everyone that we opened our promotional tip line last month as it has not received much attention. You can find it on the website or at this link. If you have a new story posted, a new book coming out, literally any writing news you’d like us to boost on social media PLEASE use this form: we want to help support you!

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With guild business out of the way, let’s get to the fun stuff! We featured another two members this month on the blog for interviews that we hope you check out. We’ve also had requests to interview anthology editors as well as any members with experience in producing audiobooks. If you’d qualify and want to be featured, contact our social media manager!

• Mary E. Lowd on Writing and Species as Allegories

• FuzzWolf on Furry Publishing

We saw a few new releases cross our path this month you might want to check out including:

• Love Match Book 3 from FurPlanet (NSFW)

• What Makes a Witch from Weasel Press

We also hunted down a book currently up for pre-order:

• Rightful Salvage from Goal Publications

Remember, we now have our Promotion Tip Line to submit to if you have new releases coming out, so don’t hesitate to fill that out so we can feature your book in our next newsletter!

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Currently the Furry Writers’ Market lists these markets are open:

• Swept Under the Fur Rug (Deadline: October 1st, 2020)

• 1921: Furries In Fedoras (Deadline: October 1, 2020)

• The Vore Studio (Deadline: October 31, 2020)

• Dogbumps Academy of Wayward Wixards (Deadline: November 1st, 2020)

• Reclamation Project: Year Two (Deadline: October 31, 2020)

• Electric Sewer 2: Boogie Nights (Deadline: December 1, 2020)

• The Howling Dead (Deadline: December 15th, 2020)

• iPawd – A Furry Music Anthology (Deadline January 10th, 2021)

• The Fox Spirit Book Of… Love (Deadline Unlisted)

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We’ve been getting a lot of new guild members lately! Let’s all welcome James Hudson, Dan “Spike” Gilmore, Ana Valens, JT Bird, J.S. Hawthorne, and TinyPrancingHorse! We’ve had more new members this year than in a long time, it’s been so exciting!

One last thing: the guild has been very vocal about this on social media, but we would like to remind all of our readers once more how vital the USPS is not only for small business and rural communities but for Furry Publishing. The works we all currently enjoy and the publishers we love to work with may cease to exist without it. Please make sure to do all you can to help defend the USPS! Until next month, keep staying safe and keep writing.

• FWG President Linnea “LiteralGrill” Capps

One of the biggest facets of getting a book published is, well, publishers! While many authors self-publish these days, the furry community is lucky to have several publishers and imprints focused on publishing anthropomorphic fiction.

Today we’re sharing an interview with FuzzWolf, an FWG member and the current owner of FurPlanet. We discuss many aspects of furry publishing, what drives book sales, and how to promote yourself as an author. Without further ado, let’s get to the interview!

FWG: For‌ ‌those‌ ‌that‌ ‌might‌ ‌not‌ ‌know‌ ‌you,‌ ‌please‌ ‌tell‌ ‌our‌ ‌readers‌ ‌a‌ ‌bit‌ ‌about‌ ‌yourself.‌

FuzzWolf: Hi. Well, my name’s FuzzWolf. Most people just call me Fuzz. I’ve been a furry since 1998. I’m originally from Scotland, but my family moved to the US when I was 8 so I don’t have the accent anymore.

In 2005 I moved to Dallas, TX to live with my boyfriend. It’s 15 years later and now we’re married and have a house so I’d say that worked out.

FWG: What do you think makes a good story?

FuzzWolf: Lots of different things, it depends. Characters you care about is the main one. You don’t always have to like them, but they have to be interesting and the reader has to be invested in whether they succeed or fail in what they’re trying to do.

There should be a clear goal, something the main character wants to do, and then there are obstacles in their way preventing them from that goal.

Another thing I enjoy in a good story is a degree of worldbuilding. It depends on the story whether the worldbuilding is very present, and the world itself is a character of sorts, or whether it’s more subtle worldbuilding where the story is more about the characters.

FWG: You work in publishing in the furry scene, so let’s dive into that! What got you into the publishing side of the fandom?

FuzzWolf: I had taken a “desktop publishing” class in college in the early 90s so there was some level of interest there long before I got into fandom publishing.

Like most publishers in the fandom, I started off as a writer. I was published in FurNation Magazine. FurNation was based here in Dallas so I picked up one of my contributor copies in person, and the owner showed me around the equipment he used to make the magazines. I was fascinated by it, and I started helping out. I volunteered with FN for a bit, doing layouts and making magazines and comics by hand.

After I was laid off in 2007, I decided I wanted to start my own publishing business. By the way, this is the exact opposite of what all the “start your own business” guides will tell you to do. Don’t start a business because you’re done with corporate America after getting laid off. You have few resources to work with and you’re not in the right headspace. I got a new job later that year, but the passion for publishing was still there so I moved forward.

Eventually, I ended up acquiring FurPlanet from its former owner and officially took over in March 2008.

FWG: What kind of unique challenges do you face as a publisher of what might be considered niche literature?

FuzzWolf: There are probably as many benefits as there are challenges. I suppose the biggest one is audience size. As with the rest of society, only a small percentage of people read books, and you cut that number down even more when working within a small niche like furry. So, a furry company is likely to hit a growth ceiling sooner because there are only so many furries out there.

However, like a lot of niche interests, the people who are into furry are really into furry. And the furries who buy books are super supportive of their publishers.

I wouldn’t call this a challenge so much as it is a difference between mainstream and furry publishers. For mainstream publishers, the majority of their book sales are going to be sold online at that big river dot com company, and maybe some through traditional bookstores. A minority of our sales are through those avenues. We sell almost all of our books directly to consumers without an intermediary, either via our website or face to face at conventions. That means more work for us, either packing and shipping online orders, or all the work that goes into dealing at a convention, but it means we interact with our customers directly and I think that’s a positive thing.

FWG: FurPlanet puts out several anthologies a year, but also several novels. Do you get a lot of pitches for novels? If so, do you publish many of them?

FuzzWolf: We have it on our website that we’re not officially open for novel submissions so we don’t get that many. Most of the novels we publish are new books from authors we have already been working with. I would like to open up to additional authors at some point. It’s just a matter of time being available to do so.

FWG: Going back to anthologies for a moment, how do these compare in sales to novels themselves?

FuzzWolf: A couple of years ago, I went through our sales data back to 2006 to answer that question. I found that in general, anthologies sell only about 1/3 what novels and novellas do.

FWG: There’s plenty of furry writers who focus on getting stories into anthologies. With those numbers, would you suggest writers consider focusing on getting their own novel out there to help increase their prestige or name recognition?

FuzzWolf: I enjoy short stories, and I think they serve an important function for writers. They give authors a chance to work with an editor and go through that process of having someone from outside their friend group review their work, and work with them to make it the best story it can be. Anthologies also give experience in writing and revising to a deadline and writing towards a specific theme. Submit stories to enough anthologies and you’ll get to write about a lot of different things. Broadening your writing beyond your preferred genre is a critical step in a writer’s development.

They also get your name in front of a publisher. I know I’ve personally advised authors I’ve seen write amazing short stories that I want to see their novel when they finish it.

Also, in both mainstream and furry writing, short stories are how a lot of authors build an audience and get their name out there. You can also repurpose the stories after their exclusivity period has expired, depending on the particular contract. This gives you content for your various galleries (FA, SF, etc), and if a market is open to reprints and you happen to have a previously-published story which fits then you can get paid twice for it.

Even if you’re not submitting to anthologies, I still think writing short stories and posting online is good for building your skills and growing an audience. Even writing to a weekly prompt achieves some of that diversity of stories.

I’d recommend submitting short stories and posting them online while also working on a longer-term project, like having a novel idea brewing in your head.

FWG: FurPlanet puts out ROAR and FANG annually. Are there any challenges getting an anthology series out yearly? Differences between these anthologies and one-off anthologies?

FuzzWolf: There are definitely challenges with keeping a regular title going, especially if you’re trying to keep them releasing at the same time each year. We aim to release FANG and ROAR at Anthrocon every year, but this year we missed that mark due to COVID 19 throwing the world into chaos.

With a one-off anthology there is less of an issue if you have to postpone a release since there isn’t a second volume that has to come out in 12 months that may also be affected.

There is also the matter of editors. With our regular series, we have the advantage of working with an editor for several volumes over a period of time, and they improve their skill with each volume and learn our expectations. There can be a few bumps in the road early on in a working relationship so the one-off anthologies have that. We take a chance when we do a one-off because it doesn’t have name recognition going back years like our regular anthologies do. We just have to hope that the theme resonates with readers.

FWG:A lot of furries say you have to write or draw sex to be successful in the fandom. You’re in a unique position to know about this directly. Do adult novels sell better than those for general audiences?

FuzzWolf: Speaking very broadly, our adult books do sell better than our general audience books. However, there are a ton of caveats to that.

For one thing, in the mainstream book trade Adult Fiction simply means books for grownups, as opposed to Young Adult or children’s book categories. In the fandom, we label books as adult in part due to how conventions define them. If a book has a couple of explicit scenes, even if the sex is not the point of the book, we have to label that adult. But in an actual bookstore, they don’t have a big warning sticker plastered on American Gods, for example.

I’ve seen books with a lot of sex sell moderately, and books we marketed as YA sell extremely well. You can be a non-adult writer and have successful books. You just have to tell a good story and find your audience.

FWG: How important is cover art to selling a furry novel? Do you think employing well-known artists in a fandom that tends to be visually focused helps sell books?

FuzzWolf: I cannot overstate how important cover art is to selling books, any books. The audience for each genre has certain expectations when it comes to covers. This is where things like minimalist typographic covers for science fiction and literary fiction, shirtless men in kilts in romance, and painted castles in fantasy come from.

In general, furry readers want to see a furry on the cover. Don’t go abstract, even if it’s beautiful. If you are trying to sell primarily to furries, you have to have furries on your book cover.

A well-known artist will help with sales. Not only for their highly developed skill, but because they will often assist with promoting the book. Here’s a tip, always credit your illustrators. Do so in the book, and also in your marketing material. If you tweet the cover of your book, include your artist’s Twitter handle. They will often retweet it, and very often their following will be bigger than yours.

I’ve heard writers complain sometimes about furry being such a visual community, but I’d like to stress that artists should be your friends when it comes to selling your book. Artists and writers can and should work together.

I’ll also add that you don’t have to go with the most popular artists if that is out of your budget. You can find a lot of skilled artists who are not that well known, and a book cover commission can offer less well-known artists access to a new audience.

To summarize my feelings on covers, they say you should never go cheap on a mattress or a pair of shoes. When it comes to books, put your budget into your cover. It will help.

FWG: What about books having interior pictures? Is this worth doing for most releases?

FuzzWolf: This has been a point of discussion among some of us before. I think what it comes down to is if you want interior illustrations because they’re cool, or you really want to see your characters illustrated then it can’t hurt.

In my experience, it doesn’t help sales though. If you have a set budget and are weighing between interior illustrations or a better cover then I’d put the money into the cover, another editor pass, or another type of marketing.

FWG: Can you give any insights on the process of getting artwork for books for our readers who might be curious or self publish?

FuzzWolf: Look at the books which have covers you really like or that drew you to the book. You can hire that same artist or someone with a style that appeals in the same way.

An important thing to remember is that a great piece of art and a great book cover are not the same things. Sometimes a piece will work as a standalone illustration, but won’t be appropriate for a book cover.

Another point to ask is if your artist has any experience with typography and design. Are they sending you a cover with your title and name on it already? Or are they just doing the art? If it’s the latter, you’ll want to find a graphic designer to work on the actual layout for you.

On that note, I’d also advise hiring a typographer for your interior layout. There are subtle nuances to typography that can affect the visual appeal and readability of your book. It seems easy, but a lot of time goes into it, and I consider a worthwhile investment.

FWG: What would you say is the one thing you wish all writers knew about publishers and publishing books?

FuzzWolf: While a deep love of books is usually what drives someone to publishing, you’ll have to deal with a lot of less fun things too. Contracts, accounting, taxes, printers, marketing. If you can accept that challenge, you’ll be in a better position to be successful.

FWG: Do you have any last thing you’d like to tell our readers?

FuzzWolf: Please continue to order books and comics from all the furry publishers and our community’s independent sellers. You can support furry-owned businesses and the post office at the same time!

We would like to thank FuzzWolf once again for answering all of our questions! FurPlanet will be having an online book launch for Kyell Gold’s final volume of Love Match. The book releases August 25th and the book launch will take place this coming weekend. You can read about the book and pre-order it on their website and find details on the book launch here.

We hope this insight into furry publishing was informative to all of our readers. If you have ideas or suggestions on what kinds of interviews we should feature next, please contact our Social Media Manager. Until next time, may your words flow like water.

Did you know that both National Dog Day and National Cat Day both occur in August? Before you think this is a weird way to start a post on the FWG blog, we promise the pieces to the puzzle will be arranged shortly.

Today we are sharing an interview with Mary E. Lowd who is not only a Furry Writers’ Guild member but has also recently had the novel “When a Cat Loves a Dog” published by Goal Publications. We sat down with Mary to discuss writing in general, her new book, and using species as allegories in stories. Enough with the introduction, let’s get to the interview!

FWG: For those that might not know you, please tell our readers a bit about yourself.

Mary: Hey, readers.  I’m a science-fiction and furry writer who lives in Oregon.  I grew up reading the Redwall books by Brian Jacques and watching Star Trek: The Next Generation — the combination of those pretty much established my aesthetic.  After college, I spent a period of time that felt like forever (but was apparently only seven years) trying to be a serious science-fiction writer whose stories centered on humans… and failing horribly, by way of writing Otters In Space. 

Then I discovered the furry fandom, joined the Furry Writers’ Guild, started writing for furry anthologies and furry publishers, and have somehow ended up a decade later editing my own furry fiction e-zine.

FWG: What do you think makes a good story?

Mary: For me?  Spaceships and talking animals.  Robots are also good, maybe some magic.  Seriously though, every reader will have a different answer, and those answers will vary depending on the day.  Right now, during a global pandemic, I’m probably more interested in escapist wish-fulfillment stories than hard-hitting incisive idea pieces.  And that’s okay.  Fiction fills many roles — some stories will change how you think about the world forever; other stories simply help you get through a hard day.

FWG: To say you are a prolific writer would be an understatement. You have won several awards (including our own Coyotl Awards), have over 150 published short stories, and even run your own e-zine. How do you manage balancing your life while maintaining so much writing output?

Mary: I… don’t.  I’ve been fighting with my husband about this very question a lot over the last month.  He’s incredibly supportive… but then, also… not.  Because come on, we live in a society that puts different pressures on women than on men, and even when he tries to do half of the work it ends up being a smaller half, and I can either pick up the slack or… let the house fill with trash and the children run wild.  So, looking forward to a year of, essentially, homeschooling due to the pandemic… well, I don’t know.  I’m exhausted, and every day, there’s another day tomorrow.  Somehow though, I’ll keep writing, because as far as I can tell, I became a writer because it soothes my intrinsic anxiety.

There was a time when I had to do my writing with a baby on my lap, a six-year-old next to me, and Blue’s Clues taking up half of my computer monitor.  So, I’ll manage somehow, but I don’t know how.  I do have a special cheat code though:  my mom is the most amazing, and she lives next door.  So, a great deal of the writing I get done is directly due to her support and willingness to watch my kids for big chunks of time.

FWG: We also have to ask, with so many published works, do you have any tips for our readers on how to get stories or books accepted by publishers?

Oh goodness, so much… But this question is really too broad, because the answer is entirely different for short stories vs. novels, and then again completely different depending on the type of novel publisher.  In every case, persistence is key.  Sadly, rejections are the cornerstone of most successful writing careers.  Get used to them.  Find ways to celebrate them.  The writing group I was in for a decade had everyone announce their rejections from the week at the beginning of every meeting and then be rewarded with chocolate. 

I like to think of my rejection total as an ever-growing high score.  Right now, it’s 1682, and that will likely be out of date by the time this interview is posted.  Because the rejections don’t stop; you don’t graduate out of them; you just learn to weather them and keep persisting.  And I promise, with practice, they do get easier.

FWG: So we have established you’re well published, but what is your favorite of all them that you have written?

Mary: This is always a hard question, because if I didn’t love a work enough to pour my time and energy into it, then I wouldn’t bother writing it.  However, I think I have to go with Nexus Nine.  When I was a kid watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Jadzia Dax was my favorite character.  She may still be my favorite character of all time. 

Anyway, my heart was broken when she died at the end of season six, but then when Ezri Dax showed up at the beginning of season seven, lost and confused by holding Jadzia Dax’s memories without actually being her… I can’t really explain the emotions I felt.  Her first scene is incredible.  She’s both Dax and not Dax, and I immediately loved her and felt for her plight, even while missing Jadzia and knowing they weren’t the same.

I wanted to write about that kind of character, and so I created Mazel Rheun, a calico cat with a computer chip in her head that carries the memories of dozens of previous individuals, most recently the dog who was her captain.  Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is a big part of my heart and who I’ve become, and Nexus Nine is my love letter to it.

FWG: When a Cat Loves a Dog was recently published by Goal Publications. Can you tell us a little about the book?

Mary: When a Cat Loves a Dog originated with the character of Topher Brooke, a pug dog comedian who makes fun of cats ironically.  See, Stephen Colbert used to have this show called The Colbert Report where he presented the news while pretending to be a rightwing numbskull.  So, I was playing my standard game of “what kind of dog or cat would this person be?” and the idea for a story popped into my head about this pug dog comedian proposing to his cat girlfriend.  You can read the story, “A Real Stand-Up Guy,” on my personal archive site here: http://deepskyanchor.com/a-real-stand-up-guy/

When a Cat Loves a Dog follows Topher Brooke and Lashonda, the cat he proposed to, after they get married and decide to have a family.  In order to do their story justice, I had to read a bunch of books researching the history of in vitro fertilization and gene therapy which was completely fascinating.  I also read up about mixed-race adoption and sea steads. 

I don’t think I’ve ever researched another book more thoroughly.  Though there’s also a lot of personal touches lifted from my own life and experience of marriage.  The result is a novel that’s a mix between a tender love story between a cat and dog, an exploration of how their society reacts to their marriage, and some fun medical sci-fi.

FWG: In your previous stories in the Otters in Space trilogy, as well as more recently published works like When a Cat Loves a Dog, you use differing species as a lens to discuss a lot of real-world issues. What inspired you to do this?

Mary: Okay, so, literally, I had a dog who got really mad when cats were way up high.  Like if they were on the floor, they were friends; if they were on the top of a bookshelf, they were probably evil mountain lions planning to eat his sheep.  He was a Sheltie, so he was pretty sure he must have had some sheep somewhere.  When I wrote Otters In Space, focusing on a cat who was oppressed by a dog who wanted to outlaw cats traveling up the space elevator to the otter space station… that’s what I was writing about.  That’s it.

Yes, in the first few scenes, my tabby cat protagonist worries about how there’s no point in going to the cops, because they’re all dogs and won’t listen to her.  But… see, I was so sheltered, naive, and privileged that I thought I was writing about an interesting speculative concept.  I had no idea back then that the real world police were actually worse than the dogs in my book.  I was white and grew up watching Star Trek.  I thought sexism and racism were sad chapters in the past.  I’ve learned a lot over the last fifteen years.

FWG:  We’ve seen attempts to use species as allegories for race and racism in films like Zootopia in recent times. Do you think there are advantages to using animals for anthropomorphic characters instead of human characters to discuss these issues? Disadvantages? 

Mary: Using animal characters in place of humans is a little like someone in a sitcom telling a story about their “friend” who needs advice, when everyone knows they mean themself.  It gives you distance.  It gives you space.  It gives you plausible deniability.  But in the end, we know that stories we tell about animals are usually at a deeper level about ourselves.  Or even if they’re not — if say, it’s a story about a weird quirk of jellyfish biology that simply doesn’t apply to humans — then we’ll still find a way to make it about us anyway.  Humans are good at that.

There can be a sense of safety in using a funhouse mirror to look at yourself and see yourself reflected in a more comfortable, fuzzier way, before having to admit to yourself that, yes, that’s you.  But there’s also a danger that people will look at the twists and contortions of the mirror — for instance, intrinsic biological differences between predator and prey species — and try to map those features onto human differences in a way that magnifies them out of proportion.  This is why it’s sometimes important to strip those levels of obfuscation away.  There are some stories that need to be told straightforwardly with absolutely no misdirection, no space for misinterpretation, no way to wiggle out of what you’re seeing.

So, yes, there are both advantages and disadvantages for using furry characters; both furry and mainstream stories have their place, and both kinds of stories should be told with care.

FWG: Given the current political climate, and how this topic has recently been controversial in the mainstream writing space, has your approach to covering these kinds of topics shifted? Especially in a time where we are trying to center BIPOC voices in all areas.

Mary: My approach to thinking about the relationship between furry fiction and allegory began shifting years ago as I started becoming aware of how pervasive racism is in the United States and how much I’d been sold a lie back in the 90s about how sexism was over.  This was particularly driven home for me by two key aspects of writing Otters In Space 3.

The first two Otters In Space books were already published when I was writing the third, establishing certain facts as canon.  For instance, Emily the octopus chef on the otter spaceship talks in the first book about how octopuses die after laying their eggs — except her, making her an outcast.  In the third book, I wanted the characters to visit a big octopus city under the ocean, and I realized I was deeply uncomfortable with the idea of actually depicting the society implied by Emily’s speech. 

When I’d written the first book, I’d been fascinated by the real world fact that octopi die after laying their eggs, and I hadn’t been thinking about how I was essentially — in video game terms — making octopus women a largely unplayable race.  That made me really uneasy, so I needed a way to retcon what I’d already written.  I ended up settling on making Emily from a backwards cult, and so when Kipper (the tabby cat main character) gets to the octopus city, she’s surprised to discover octopi are generally fine after laying their eggs. 

When she expresses her surprise, the octopus woman guiding them through the city acknowledges that, yes, sadly there are still religious cults who expect women to die after laying eggs and thus enforce those expectations.  Similarly, Kipper discovers that there’s a lot about the world above sea level that she didn’t know, because the dogs printing the history books have a very particular, religiously skewed world view.  This is partly a retcon, but it partly simply reflects my experience of life.  I grew up thinking that sexism and racism were over, but as I experienced more of the world, I learned that what I’d been told was wrong.

The second key aspect of writing Otters In Space 3 that stopped me in my tracks was that I had outlined a plot arc for one of the cat characters that involved her driving around aimlessly to get her kittens to fall asleep, being pulled over by a police dog for no reason other than prejudice, and being wrongly arrested.  Between the time I outlined this plot arc and actually got to writing it… 

Look, I don’t know if it would be considered libelous under our complicated legal system to say that Sandra Bland was murdered by police, so…  I’ll just say that she was arrested in a way that was very similar to what I’d outlined.  And it hit me really hard that when you’re writing furry fiction, you will end up writing allegory, whether you plan to, intend to, or want to.  It’ll be there.  People will look at the animals in your stories, and they’ll see people.  The furry worlds that you create may or may not reflect your subconscious beliefs about race, gender identity, and sexual orientation, but it will look like they do. 

So be conscious about your choices.  Be aware of how your words will sound when seen through an allegorical light, because you can’t fully escape that light.  Stories about animals are, at their heart, stories about people, because they’re written and read by people.

FWG: When tackling difficult subjects like this, how important do you find sensitivity readers to be for your work, and how do you get them to check out your novels before publishing?

Mary: I haven’t actually used any sensitivity readers, but I’ve found it essential to seek out and read works — books, blog posts, tweet threads, etc. — by people who have lived experiences that I don’t.  There is absolutely no substitute for listening to other people and believing them about their own lives.

FWG: Any last words for our readers?

Mary:  Find the points of brightness in the world and hold on to them.  For me, that’s furry fiction — writing it, reading it, and right now, re-watching BoJack Horseman.  And if you can find the strength to make more points of brightness — believe that they mean something to someone else out there, even if you can’t see it.  Because we need more light.

We would like to thank Mary for sitting down to talk with us. Be sure to check out the e-zine she runs called Zooscape and to follow her on Twitter. We hope you found this interview informative and entertaining. Until next time, may your words flow like water.

Hello there FWG members, it’s time for another monthly newsletter! Is it surprising that we have a lot to talk about once again? Let’s just get right down to business.

We want to be able to do more to promote our members in the guild. To make this happen, we have three new projects we intend to tackle with your help.

First, we intend to update our suggested reading page. There were links to a lot of older articles and the like on there, but a lot of those things while solid resources aren’t regularly updated. So we will be taking works submitted by our membership to feature on our list!

If you would like your work featured you will need to fill out this form. We intend to attempt to populate the list by looking at furry publisher’s websites but if you don’t fill out the form, we can’t guarantee we’ll catch your work. Help us help promote you! We’ll only be listing works including current FWG members as a perk for your continued membership and support.

Second, we wish to use our social media platforms to help promote people further. It is impossible to catch every new release, book giveaway, and other promotional things to help our members get spotlights. Our staff simply doesn’t have that much time to dig through Twitter (our social media manager is already doing the work for two other officer positions).

So we will be introducing the FWG Promotion Tip Line as a new service offered to members of the guild! All you have to do is fill out this two question form to get featured on our social media. This is the place to tell us if you have new books released (self published or not), give us links to posts to stories on places like SoFurry or FurAffinity, or generally anything else furry lit related the guild can promote. We’ll be keeping this link up on our front page so it’s easy to find. This is another service only open to current FWG members as a perk for your continued support and membership.

We also want to make it clear that NSFW material is okay to submit to us for promotion. We always tag any links to NSFW works on our social media so that users can avoid them if they wish. NSFW furry lit is STILL furry lit. We will not exclude adult focused writers.

Third, we’ve been discussing this idea and there seems to be interest from some of our membership as well as furry publishers. We want to host an online convention with a focus on furry literature. We know how hard it has been hurting authors to lose convention sales so we want to help make that slightly better. We don’t have a lot of details to offer yet as this is a larger project to figure out, but we intend to try and host this during Furry Book Month in October. We hope to feature panels, readings from authors, an online dealers den, and potentially a writing contest among other fun things.

If you have interest in volunteering to help with this please contact a guild officer so we can speak with you. We will most certainly need help with potentially streaming panels, so if you have a solid PC setup and time to help we really would like to hear from you. We’ll likely have calls for panels, the dealer’s den, and other things as we get closer to the date. Publishers, expect us to reach out to you soon.

Our final piece of guild business is to mention we still have two potential officer positions to fill: Social Media Manager and Cóyotl Awards Chair. If you would be interested in volunteering please message our guild president Linnea “LiteralGrill” Capps.

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With guild business out of the way, let’s get to the fun stuff! We featured two interviews with FWG members this month. We discussed multimedia fiction with Thurston Howl and discussed writing adult furry works with recent Cóyotl Award winner Gre7g Luterman. Be sure to check these out as they offer fantastic insights to help with your own writing!

• Thurston Howl on Multimedia Fiction and Sensory De-Tails
• Gre7g Luterman on Writing Erotica and Long Way Home

We’d love to take this opportunity to mention we would love to feature more interviews like his, as well as potential guest posts on writing tops for our blog. Please contact a guild officer if you would be interested.

We saw a few new releases cross our path this month you might want to check out including:

• Dogpile from Bound Tales (NSFW)
• The Great Slay: Poached Parody by P.C. Hatter
• Howloween from Bound Tales (NSFW)
• Cold Trailing from Bound Tales (NSFW)
• A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking from FurPlanet

We also hunted down two books currently up for pre-order from furry publishers! 

• SOAR Volume One from Goal Publications
• What Makes a Witch from Weasel Press

Remember, we now have our Promotion Tip Line to submit to if you have new releases coming out, so don’t hesitate to fill that out so we can feature your book in our next newsletter!

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Part of our website update was making our Furry Writers’ Market better than ever before! You can find all of open markets for furry writing we can track down here: https://furrywritersguild.com/furry-writers-market/

Currently, these markets are open:

• Dread Volume 2. (Deadline: August 7, 2020)
• Minnow Literary Magazine (Deadline: September 1, 2020)
• Swept Under the Fur Rug (Deadline: October 1, 2020)
• 1921: Furries In Fedoras (Deadline: October 1, 2020)
• The Vore Studio (Deadline: October 31, 2020)
• Dogbumps Academy of Wayward Wixards (Deadline: November 1, 2020)
• Reclamation Project: Year Two (Deadline: October 31, 2020)
• Electric Sewer 2: Boogie Nights (Deadline: December 1, 2020)
• The Howling Dead (Deadline: December 15, 2020)
• iPawd – A Furry Music Anthology (Deadline January 10, 2021)
• The Fox Spirit Book Of… Love (Deadline Unlisted)

Consider checking out our page for details and writing up a story for one of these awesome anthologies!

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We have a few more things to mention, we’d like to welcome our newest members G.C. Stargazer, Ezen Baklattan, and Roci Stone! We also wanted to say we had a massive several person tie for who beta read the most stories this month on Discord. Keep the competition, and those stories to look at coming.

We’d also like to congratulate Sparf, T. Kingfisher, Gre7g Luterman, and Tim Susman on their recent Cóyotl Awards win! If you’re reading this, we’re working on figuring out a safe way to get awards shipped out to you. We’ll get a hold of you soon to get those shipping details.

I know life has been hitting us hard lately, so I want to remind you all just how much of an achievement it is to have kept going. Whether you’ve been writing thousands of words or only a few, any progress is still progress. It’s not easy keeping creative right now, so allow yourself whatever time you can to relax, especially with a good book if you can. Keep safe and well everyone, let’s do our best to get through August too.

– FWG President Linnea “LiteralGrill” Capps

 

Welcome to another interview with a member of the Furry Writers’ Guild! Before we get started we’re obviously discussing things that are NSFW today as we discuss erotica writing so readers be advised.

At the Furry Writers’ Guild, we’re not afraid of adult writing. Erotica can sell well anywhere, especially within the fandom, with some of our biggest anthologies produced every year being erotic in nature. However, not everyone is experienced in writing such spicy stories and might not know where to start or if they should at all.

While writing adult stories isn’t for everyone, we have some wonderful insights from those who may want to try from FWG member Gre7g Luterman. Gre7g recently won a 2019 Cóyotl Award for “Fair Trade” which is a safe for work novel set in the Hayven Celestia Universe. Today however, we sat down with Gre7g to discuss writing his debut erotic novel “Long Way Home” to discuss his adventures in the adult writing space.

Enough introductions, let’s get to the interview!

 

FWG: Let’s start at the beginning, tell the guild a little about yourself in case readers don’t know you.

Gre7g: All right. My name is Gre7g Luterman. I started writing in the late 70s. For a little while in the 90’s I was known for running a website called “The Temple of Luna” (I was huge into werewolves back then!) and then I made a chat site called “Wolfhome” which was popular in the early 2000s. Back in the 90’s, I wrote a novella that was moderately popular called “Ley Lines” and I wrote my first novel, “Monstrous Motives”. It was awful. I ran a couple writing contests out of the Temple.

Then in the mid-2000s, I wrote a serial novel called “Brick and Mortar” for the World of Warcraft fandom. In ’09, I moved to Alabama and wrote a trilogy of books based on Rick Griffin’s short story, “Ten Thousand Miles Up”.

The trilogy was really well received in the fandom and just recently, the third book in the trilogy, “Fair Trade”, was the first story to win all three of the fandom’s awards, the Ursa Major, the Coyotl, and the Leo Literary Award. I also wrote a SciFi murder mystery and an erotica in the same universe, and I helped Rick edit an anthology of short stories from various authors in the same universe.

FWG: Long Way Home was your first erotic novel correct? What inspired you to take the leap into writing erotic fiction when your previous works were all safe for work?

Gre7g: Well, I have written some erotic short stories previously. “Long Way Home” was just the first novel-length story.

So, anyhow, a couple years ago, my wife and I went out drinking in Chattanooga. I got very drunk and—those who have seen me drink at cons can verify—I’m a really loud drunk. So there I am, in this restaurant, boohoo-ing at the top of my lungs about how much effort I put into my stories, but no one ever gives them a chance because they’re not porn.

And Ky—who is eternally unphased by anything—just says, “So, write a porno.”

Then I spent like the next hour shouting about, “Okay, I will!” But I really didn’t want to do one of the “You’re not the usual pizza delivery guy!” Pornos that are so common in the fandom. I wanted the story to come first, to write a real adventure… that just happens to have a lot of graphic sex in it.

FWG: We’ve all heard “sex sells”. It’s a common message especially across the furry fandom that you ‘need’ to write erotica to get noticed. Seeing as how this was partially your motivation to write the novel be honest, has it sold better than your other books?

Gre7g: Yup. It has proven to be my best-seller. Not a real shocker, but a confirmation. But even before I wrote it, I had always told people that my evil plan to get a readership was to write a bunch of non-porn stories that I was super proud of, and THEN to write an erotica.

My thinking was that readers would be all, “Ooh, furry porn!” pick it up, love it, and then say, “What else has he written?” and then without even realizing that the others weren’t porn, they’d scoop them up and I’d sucker them into reading something more substantial.

FWG: In general has that been an effective strategy you might suggest to other authors who normally might not want to write erotic fiction?

Gre7g: It’s still a little early to say if that plan has worked out. Like I said, “Long Way Home” continues to be my best seller. But it can’t hurt, right?

What I do feel confident in saying is that there’s an old adage that everyone has a million bad words in them. Until you get those out of the way, you can’t get to all the good words to follow. So keep writing no matter what. Even if everyone hates the stories you’re writing now, it may just be that you’re still working through the bad words to get to the good ones.

FWG: So onto marketing the book itself, you’ve said Long Way Home is “too hot for amazon”. Is this just a marketing ploy or is there a story behind this? In general, what changes in marketing do you have to make when promoting Long Way Home instead of your other works?

Gre7g: Well, so there’s a funny thing about illustrations in erotic novels—they all tend to show what happens RIGHT BEFORE you get to the good stuff. You might see a furry undressing, or a butt, maybe the back of a boob, but certainly not the main event. Though, if you look at what gets posted on Twitter feeds and popular furry sites, it’s obvious what the fans really want to see.

So, when it came time for the illustrations, I asked Ky for the good stuff, the best moment of each erotic scene. Well, long story short, it turns out there’s a reason why erotica is illustrated the way it is. The text can be incredibly graphic, but as soon as the illustrations are too dirty, Amazon won’t sell it.

They, actually, sounded quite pissed in their e-mails. They locked my account, made me promise to never do it again, threatened to watch anything else I submitted to them with ADDITIONAL SCRUTINY.

Anyhow, I definitely didn’t want to waste all of Ky’s amazing artwork, so I decided not to change the art, not to add censor bars or anything, to have the books printed privately, and sell them through my website (https://gre7g.com/). True, I’m now missing out on Amazon’s amazing reach and how they cross-promote books, but oh well, the book remains intact and available for people to buy.

FWG: Independently selling your books isn’t a new thing for you by any means. Before the pandemic, you used to attend a lot of southeastern conventions. With so many publishers and distributors at those conventions, why did you choose to sell at your own booth? Are there advantages to doing so authors should be aware of?

Gre7g: Well, what I’ve found is that it’s nightmarishly hard to break into writing! It seems like there’s only a handful of authors with name recognition whose books will sell whether people have heard good things about them or not. The rest of us are left to squabble over the few readers who are willing to try an unknown. And INSIDE the fandom, instead of a handful of authors, it’s more like two.

If a book says “Ursula Vernon” or “Kyell Gold” on the cover for example, then it’s sure to sell great, but for anyone else, the book has to be actively promoted before it will sell.

Like you said, there’s a lot of publishers and book distributors going to cons that you can sell your books through, but if a dealer’s got books from two dozen different authors, how much is he going to promote yours? Will he even have read it?

Besides, conventions are one of the few times I EVER get to talk to readers and other aspiring authors. I love giving talks on the craft and blathering on to anyone who stops by my table. And I love getting feedback from fans. I want to know what worked and what didn’t so I can make my next story perfect.

Sadly, you don’t get a lot of feedback as a published author. Readers are moderately quick to leave comments on stories posted online, but as soon as it’s a printed book or an e-book, a lot more people read them than actually tell you what they thought!

FWG: So this is a way to get some reviews in a specific way, things like if your cover design is doing well, your sales pitch is solid, things like that?

Gre7g: No, it’s not anything quite so formal. The biggest thing about writing is finding a way to keep motivated. Writing a novel is a little like being a radio DJ. You’re out there, giving it your best shot, but your audience is way far away. You can’t hear them laugh, no matter how hilarious a joke you tell.

Same thing. I can write a book that brings the audience to tears, brings them to their feet and they cheer, but will I hear it? No. So, I’m just sitting there in my basement, typing away. I get a royalty check from Amazon every month, but does anyone actually like the stories? Why am I even doing this?

But you go to a con and there’s one single fan who runs up to the table all tongue-tied that wants to tell me about how much they love the story, and NOW I want to run home and write more. Yeah, sure, sometimes people will put that love out in an Amazon review, but it’s not even nearly the same as talking to someone in person. That recharges your batteries and makes you want to do it again.

FWG: You recently started a Patreon, how has that been going? Has it had a similar effect of allowing you to connect more directly with fans?

Gre7g: Yes! I love Patreon! You can find me at https://www.patreon.com/gre7g and I get that same feedback high there in spades! Initially, I was afraid to try it because I didn’t want to put myself in a position where I owed the subscribers stuff, but now that I’ve taken the plunge, instead of waiting to finish an entire novel, got it edited, illustrated, and published, I can just dash together a crazy idea for a scene and toss it up.

It can even be in a totally different universe or something strictly NON-canon, and that’s okay. I’m not breaking a rule of our universe because it’s just for fun and not published. Sometimes the readers love it and sometimes they don’t, but I get that feedback right away. I even let them suggest things that they’d like to see happen and I write that.

Oh sure, now I’m writing on a dozen different storylines and it could be ages before one turns into a completed book, but I’m having fun and I think my Patrons are too.

FWG: Especially as we’re discussing erotica a bit today, are you worried about how Patreon has been locking certain accounts of adult content posted not only on Patreon, but on other websites?

Gre7g: Yeah, that is frustrating! It doesn’t directly impact me since there’s often ways around it. If I, for example, write an erotic scene that I want to share with my readers, I can still make a Patreon post and include a link to my own website where I can host whatever I like. Then Patreon is still faultless and I’m taking responsibility for my own content.

But I’m not just a producer. I’m a consumer too. I love seeing things that creative make, regardless of whether it is G rated or X. I don’t want to see some politician or some investor impose an agenda that dries up the content I would have otherwise enjoyed.

FWG: So for our readers, especially as many are authors themselves, do you have any tips for any that want to try writing something on the erotic side for the first time? Anything to offer from your own experiences trying this as something newer?

Gre7g: Well, I suppose my advice would be to find an avenue where you can get that instant feedback, like I have on Patreon or that other authors are getting by posting their stuff on AO3, SoFurry, or the like. Whenever you’re going to try something new, get that feedback nice and early. Don’t worry about hiding it away so that people will have to buy it when it’s ready.

The worst thing that could happen is that you invest the zillion hours to write a whole novel and then for it to not sell because you’ve gone off in a direction that the readers aren’t into.

That was always a huge fear of mine when I first started writing, that someone would steal my story, or that they wouldn’t buy it because they’ve already read it for free on the internet. But money isn’t the end-all-be-all and there’s always more readers out there. Your priority as a writer is to keep that motivation going so that you enjoy creating and so that you keep creating.

FWG: That about wraps up the general discussion, do you have any upcoming projects you’d like to tell folks about? Anything in general you want to promote?

Gre7g: I don’t actually know what my next book will be at this point! I’ve got about a third of a murder mystery written and a chunk of a new Kanti book and various chapters of other stories.

I’m excited about all of them and I love how readers seem excited but I’m still kinda poking at each to see which will catch fire. You know that wonderful sensation when a book catches fire and you can’t wait to finish work each day so you can spend a few hours giving it some love?

None of them are quite there just yet, but when one does, I’ll be on it. For those that want to keep an eye on my progress, Patreon is 100% the best way to do it. Not only can you see what I’m messing with for a measly $1/month, but you can suggest and give me feedback on what you think too. I love talking about it and anything that helps me connect to the readers (or other authors) is great.

We want to thank Gre7g once again for sitting down to talk with us. You can find him on Twitter and his works on his website. We hope this interview helped provide some insights on writing and marketing your erotic works. Until next time, may your words flow like water.

Welcome to another interview with a member of the Furry Writers’ Guild! Recently, Bound Tales released an anthology called Sensory De-Tails. Before we go any further this is an adult anthology that is most certainly NSFW that we will be discussing today. However, it’s not simply the adult nature that makes this anthology one worth exploring.

Bound Tales offers a deluxe edition of the anthology which includes things like cologne samples, faux fur, and a music CD. The idea is to allow readers to interact with the stories presented in the anthology. Today we’ll be talking to the editor of Sensory De-Tails, Thurston Howl, to discuss multimedia fiction ad how the anthology came to be. He has edited works like The Electric Sewer, Infurno, and more. He’s also made several anthology appearances including some in ROAR, FANG, and HEAT.

Enough with the introductions, let’s get to the interview!

FWG: First for the folks that might not know you, tell us a little bit about yourself and your writing.

Howl: Sure! So, I’m Thurston Howl. I’m an editor for Sinister Stoat Publications and the lead anthology editor for Thurston Howl Publications. I founded the Furry Book Review program and have received both Leo Literary Awards and Ursa Major Awards for my writing. I typically work in erotic horror, both inside and outside the fandom. I’ve been a judge for the Silver Falchion Award and the Claymore Award, both horror awards in the Killer Nashville program. Personally, I am a bigender person living with HIV and work with a lot of activism regarding that.

FWG: What inspired you to make an anthology like Sensory DeTails?

Howl: So, before Sensory De-Tails, I’d edited a lot of furry anthologies. What bothered me very often, even with big-name furry writers, was that canines couldn’t hear someone turning the corner up ahead. A feline couldn’t smell musk until they were right up against a body. A snake didn’t have any taste buds different from the canine or feline. And for me, it wasn’t a matter of “accurate” biological representation. It was about untapped potential.

In non-furry erotica, sensory details are great for immersion in sex scenes. In furry erotica, usually not much had changed despite heightened senses. So, I started the anthology as an exercise for furry writers and readers. Show off furry senses in unique and erotic ways.

FWG: So when was it that you came up with the idea to add an interactive element to the anthology? Where did the idea come from?

Howl: Well, it’s not the first time I’ve gone for something interactive. 12 Days of Yiffmas had an erotic holiday music album to accompany it, for example. The stories in Sensory De-Tails begged for an interactive component. When Al Song describes how erotic a classical piece of music is, you kind of have to hear it to believe it. When Linnea describes why you’d want to rim a beaver, well, we need to taste that, too. It just seemed totally natural to do.

FWG: Since you obviously have a well storied writing career, pun somewhat intended, you’ve edited quite a few anthologies over the years. From what you have seen, have multimedia anthologies, or multimedia fiction in general, gotten more interest from audiences? Sold more? Generated more interest?

Howl: It’s a hard question to answer. About a year ago, I wrote a blog post about how anthologies generally don’t do well. Period. Talking with other publishers, that seems to be the standard (though each of our definitions of “well” might vary). I can’t say that multimedia anthologies have done any better sales-wise. But when they are read and reviewed, people always comment on how enjoyable those components are and how they really make the reading a full experience.

FWG: So in general, the audience benefits, and that gets more people possibly interested in furry lit?

Howl: Perhaps. I don’t think I went about the anthology explicitly trying to get more people interested in furry lit. But I think that’s part of the drive for producing anthologies in general.

FWG: Let’s take a look then at how making a multimedia anthology works then. Other than picking the stories, formatting, and things seen in typical anthologies, what kinds of challenges were there in getting the deluxe edition out there?

Howl: For scents, I worked with Shoji Tiger. They work with making colognes already as a small hobby business. I had them read the stories, and they crafted scents based on the way that smell appears in those stories. One was easy, a very sweet smell. The other was a bit tougher, “muskier.” That one took a lot of trial and error.

For sounds, I just had to make a CD featuring classical songs related to the stories. Not as bad.

For sight, an artist read the stories and focused on the ways colors mattered in them, making colored art prints based on them.

For touch, I went to a hobby store to pick up textured fabrics, faux furs, and leathers in order to match the featured species of those stories. A bit tough to get it just right, but I think it’s at a good point now.

For taste, I actually had a barista turn flavor profiles from those stories into latte recipes! They taste great.

FWG: So if another editor, publisher, maybe even a self publisher, wanted to add interactive elements to their book, what suggestions might you have for them?

Howl: For starters, I’d say only do it if you want to for non-financial reasons. I’ve seen too often people pay for exquisite art, bookmarks, posters, etc. for their book, and it sell under ten copies, and they’ve been devastated. If you want to do interactive stuff, do it because it’s just fun for you. And because you want those ten people to have a good time.

FWG: Do you think there’s any smaller ways individual authors might be able to make their own stories interactive? Like a playlist to go with their story or something similar?

Howl: For sure! Playlists are one easy way (we did that with Electric Sewer). Little recipes, too. If your story has a world-building element, throw in a “Which Nation Would You Be From?” quiz. If you ship your own works, add little things like stickers, textures, Valentine’s Day cards from the characters, etc. There are so many options, and they largely depend on what kind of story you’re telling. But by all means, go for it. A little goes a long way!

FWG: Before we wrap up on things, any last bits of general advice to writers, editors, and publishers out there?

Howl: Be safe. Be well. Keep fighting against oppression. Keep being creative.

We hope you enjoyed our interview with Thurston Howl and learned a bit about multimedia fiction in the process! In lieu of our usual social media promotion for those interviewed, Thurston requested that we ask readers to check out Difursity.  It’s an anthology that features stories written only by furries of color, many of which are FWG members. That’s all we have for you today so until next time, may your words flow like water.

It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for, the winners of the 2019 Cóyotl Awards will be announced TONIGHT via Periscope on our Twitter account! It will be hosted by guild president and Cóyotl Awards chair Linnea “LiteralGrill” Capps alongside a miniature fuzzy co-host in fur suit. In case you have forgotten, here are the works up for the awards this year:

Best Short Story:

“Dirty Rats” by Jan Seigal (The Jackal Who Came In From The Cold)

“Night’s Dawn” by Jaden Drakus (FANG 10)

“Pack” by Sparf (Patterns in Frost: Stories from New Tibet)

Best Novella:

“Minor Mage” by T. Kingfisher

“Love Me To Death” by Frances Pauli

Best Novel:

“Titles” by Kyell Gold

“Symphony of Shifting Tides” by Leilani Wilson

“Fair Trade” by Gre7g Luterman

“Nexus Nine” by Mary E. Lowd

“The Student – Volume Three” by Joe H. Sherman

Best Anthology:

“Patterns in Frost: Stories from New Tibet” edited by Tim Susman

“Fang 9” edited by Ashe Valisca

“Fang 10” Edited by Kyell Gold & Sparf

So don’t forget to tune in tonight and see the winners. We wish all these writers and editors the best of luck and we hope to see you all there!

Hello there FWG members, it’s time for another monthly newsletter! We’ve got a good bit of news for you this month, so let’s hop right into it!

First we’ll be streaming the Cóyotl Awards Ceremony on July 8th at 8 PM CST! We know you’ve all been waiting, but we’ve finally managed to get all of our things together for our trophies and managed to get safe shipping set up. We’ll be streaming live from our Twitter account via Periscope, so keep an eye out there for the stream. 

Second, we would like to give a warm welcome to our newest guild officer: Moonraiser! They will be taking over as Markets Manager. If you know of a furry market that should be listed in our Furry Writers’ Market contact them and we’ll get it added.

Don’t forget we have a wonderful beta reading program taking place on our Discord. This month @KILL!Roy beta read the most stories! We had 15+ reads officially documented through the program this month and we hope next month we can have even more.

Last month was Pride Month so we featured several FWG members all across the LGBT+ community. We encourage you to check these out to not only learn more about your fellow guild members, but to learn a bit about how various identities can affect writing.

• Al Song 
• Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen
• Hugo Jackson
• Madison “Makyo” Scott-Clary
• Herr Wozzeck

We would like to remind everyone once more about our Microfiction Monday initiative. Any writer, non-members included, that can write a Tweet sized story has the opportunity to have it featured on our Twitter! You can learn more about the program and how to submit here. We almost ran out of submissions this month, so any stories that get sent in will almost certainly be featured! Take this opportunity to try a writing challenge and get a shoutout.

—

Last month we accidentally missed a few titles that was released and wanted to fix that! Anyone publishers or writers, with books going out should email us at [email protected] with any books that are coming out to help us not miss any titles. This includes any self published work! With this in mind, the books we missed include:

• Ninja Wolf Saizo by Saber Grey
• Kawokee by Reid Minnich & Stacy Bender
• The Right to Belong by Reid Minnich & Stacy Bender
• Bad Sushi and Other Tales by Reid Minnich & Stacy Bender
• I, the Tribunal by P.C. Hatter
• My Claws are Quick by P.C. Hatter 
• Retribution is Mine by P.C. Hatter

We also have some other new releases from this month! Be sure to check these out:

• Electric Sewer edited by Thurston Howl
• Sensory De-Tails edited by Thurston Howl

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Part of our website update was making our Furry Writers’ Market better than ever before! You can find all of open markets for furry writing we can track down here: https://furrywritersguild.com/furry-writers-market/

Currently, these anthology markets are open:

• The Furry Gameshow Network (Deadline: July 10, 2020)
• Leave The Lights On (Deadline: July 20, 2020)
• Dread Volume 2. (Deadline: August 7, 2020)
• Swept Under the Fur Rug (Deadline: October 1st, 2020)
• 1921: Furries In Fedoras (Deadline: October 31, 2020)
• Dogbumps Academy of Wayward Wixards (Deadline: November 1st, 2020)
• Reclamation Project: Year Two (Deadline: October 31, 2020)
• Electric Sewer 2: Boogie Nights (Deadline: December 1, 2020)
• The Howling Dead (Deadline: December 15th, 2020)
• iPawd – A Furry Music Anthology (Deadline January 10th, 2021)

Consider checking out our page for details and writing up a story for one of these awesome anthologies!

—

One last thing before I sign off for the month. We said it on Twitter but I’ll say it here once more: Black Lives Matter. The Furry Writers’ Guild stands in support of all of our Black members as well as any other members of marginalized groups within our ranks. We always want our members to feel safe and to do our best to uplift their voices. If there’s anything the guild could be doing better in this regard, please get in contact with me right away: it’s a top priority. Until next month, may your words flow like water.

– FWG President Linnea “LiteralGrill” Capps

Welcome to our final FWG spotlight for Pride Month! We’ve featured a lot of awesome guild members this month, and we’re certain this last interview won’t disappoint. Today we’ll sharing our interview with Herr Wozzeck who’s pronouns are he/him. Enough with our introductions however, let’s let him introduce himself!

 

FWG: Tell the guild and our readers a bit about yourself.

Herr: So my name is Herr Wozzeck, and despite the fact that I have a German pen name I’m actually fully-blooded Cuban, born in Miami and now trying to spice it up in Boston. I got my start in writing and snarking fanfiction, before I found furry through the Furry Basketball Association, and I eventually made the shift from fanfiction over to here. I’m also a musician and composer: I play with Trio Menagerie, write opera criticism on the side, and hope to add to the operatic repertory at some point (quite possibly with some furry-inflected opera, if things go my way!) And that, is in addition to my fictional writing!

FWG: What is your favorite work that you have written?

Herr: Oof, isn’t that the question of the century? I find myself coming back to my Agundio Atti-Morales stories that I wrote while still with the FBA: there are definitely things I would change about them, but I feel like it was the first time I actually found comfort in my own literary voice, in a strange way.

FWG: What do you think makes a good story?

Herr: I feel like most great stories really have to start with having good characters: as I’ve said sometimes in the past, you can get away with a surprising amount of implausibility if your story is populated with characters people are interested in, whether they’re repulsed or they relate to them.

FWG: You’re new to the guild right? How has your time with us been so far?

Herr: It’s insane, actually, and it’s provided some validation that I never knew I needed. As a self-taught writer (and someone who used to do fanfic snarks), the impostor syndrome can get very strong. The fact I’m in the guild at all just motivates me to go further than I have before, and it’s awesome to chat with a bunch of like-minded authors and feel like you’re good enough to be part of the big boys, y’know? I mean, Christ’s sake, Kyell Gold is right there!

FWG: What does Pride mean to you?

Herr: Honestly, a part of me is still figuring that out, considering how late in my life I’ve blossomed on this front, but at this moment in time Pride is very much a time of year where I find I can celebrate my gayness just a little more than usual, and for me it includes celebrating how I view my sexuality in more than just the “I like guys” sense. But it’s also a time where I think we need to look back and remember those that paved the way for the rest of us to feel comfortable in our own skins. And it’s also a month to galvanize, because for as much progress as we’ve made, we still have a long way to go!

FWG: You’re not only gay but also a part of the pup and leather communities, right? What is it that you enjoy about these communities?

Herr: Both helped me grow to accept myself in my sexual liberation. However, there are other things that I enjoy about them.

So first, I think I’ll go ahead and use the term “pet play” to refer to “puppy play” throughout the rest: in addition to puppies, some people also will do similar things with cats and even horses, and as my titleholder friend would say we don’t want to exclude anyone! But me, pet play is very much a way to step back and not worry so much about the complexities of the world. Whenever I get one of my pup hoods on (yes, I have two), there’s just something about the way you physically perceive the world that shifts how you interact with it: all sound is muffled inside those things, and you have to speak extra loud to be heard, and something about that forces me to take things more instinctively, more gesturally, to just go with the flow a little more. There’s something about that which is incredibly freeing, and it can induce your stress to melt like nobody’s business. (Note that this does not speak for everybody’s experience: you don’t need gear to be into pet play. This only reflects my experience.)

As for leather, my interest in leather is due to something deeper, far less primal. Men in leather exist in a strange oxymoron: they project a rugged, strong, sometimes violent image of masculinity, but perhaps because of the violence inherent in some of the fetishes related to leather they’re also often the most tender, understanding men on the planet. The best people in the leather community exude a masculinity that portrays caring, nurturing behaviors as a kind of strength, and it’s kept my interest alive because it has helped me rethink what masculinity should be.

FWG: There are leather and pup pride flags out there. What place do you think these kinks and communities have within the LGBT+ community at large? Are these things a part of your gay identity or just another facet of yourself as a gay person?

Herr: I think leather and pet play stand as facets of myself as a gay man, but it is an important facet to celebrate during Pride. One thing that I think is lost in the corporatization of Pride is that, in its origins, Pride never shied away from more open expressions of sexuality beyond the standard “I like the same sex” or “I am not the gender I was assigned at birth”: some would call this a reason people didn’t take us seriously, but considering how part of my journey was breaking past my own sexual repression I say it is an absolutely necessary part of Pride. Leather and pup pride flags are an extension of this, and in my eyes it is an extension worth celebrating.

At the same time, as well, it’s important not to claim leather and pet play as exclusively part of my gay identity: to do so would be to discount women in both, as well as to discount the experiences of my trans brothers and sisters in both communities. Leather and pet play communities have a very predominant gay male lean, but as my titleholder friend would put it, both are for everyone within the LGBTQ+ community, and it should be celebrated as such.

FWG: Was there a bit of a journey or story to you uncovering your identity? If so, would you be comfortable sharing with us? (If not it’s totally understandable!)

Herr: I actually already shared part of my journey in a semi-fictionalized form on my FurAffinity account, so sure, let’s fill in some blanks!

So growing up Cuban Catholic, I found myself having a lot of negative reinforcement thrown my way about the gayness from two angles: the angle of Catholicism, and the angle of how the family used to perceive it.

The first thing: something a lot of people don’t really get about Hispanic cultures is that Catholicism reigns very supreme in all of them, and in my particular case it should say something about how strong a vein it runs in the culture that even Fidel Castro couldn’t kill Cuban Catholicism despite his best efforts. Because of that, I was born into an environment where any kind of sexual expression outside of the norm is frowned upon and considered universally dirty and unsafe, even when it’s heterosexual sexual expression.

Within my family, the first exposure to queer cultures mostly came from the disapproving whispers and eye rolls, including those told to my face: I remember one time when my family and I went to see the touring production of The Producers when it came to Miami that mom pointed out the two men in the row in front of me and pointing them out being like “look at that”. Incidents like that peppered in there over a long period of time, and there was one particular incident when I was 16 that sticks in my mind forever.

These things really set me up for a rocky start for my journey: I was one of those “bi now, gay later” kids in my journey, and in hindsight a big part of the “bi now” was a side effect of the repression that comes with most Catholic upbringings. And that sexual repression was reflected in a lot of what I wrote: I won’t shy away from it, my fanfiction prior to when I finally grew comfortable with my sexuality broached some very messed up territory sexually, and while some of that can be chalked up to ‘dark and edgy’ I also think it was a symptom of how I looked at sex as being inherently bad since I kind of didn’t like my own relationship to sex and my sexuality.

It took until I was 23 and living in Cleveland, just after I’d first encountered the furries and met the man I eventually lost my virginity to. I won’t disclose his name here, but he was a rather older gentleman who was extraordinarily good to me. What I remember most about him, however, was the last time we met: when we were cuddling on my bed, he began talking about his love life. And when he did, part of me got the sense that a reason the relationship he was talking about failed was because he was very deeply entrenched in the closet in some ways: even today, I have no doubt he has never mentioned his trysts with men to anyone else in his life. And I remember asking myself ‘do I want to be like that the rest of my life’; that was the moment I sort of came to terms with myself, and resolved to come out of the closet. It ended up happening in Thanksgiving to my parents (technically before I was ready, but dad popped a question about it and the rest was history), and ever since I’ve started to learn how to be confident in myself as a gay man.

And that has been a slow process, but being part of furry fandom has definitely helped me learn how to express myself considering it is a space that doesn’t simply crush the conversation about sexuality the way Catholicism does. It helped really break me out of the sexually repressive mindset I was born into. What remained of my self-repression finally melted away after I encountered the Boston leather community when I did: I moved back in February of 2018, and encountered the bar party Fascination run by Michael Flowers, back when it was still in the basement of Jacques’ Cabaret. I’d never really had a group of in-person gay friends before, and the leather community provided exactly that. And then through that I met a puppy, got introduced to that circle, and the rest is history!

It hasn’t always been super easy afterwards, though: my family, while ultimately well-meaning, still kind of doesn’t completely get everything about how it is to be gay in that environment. I will also say, there is one thing that happened behind the scenes in November that really rattled me to my core and threatened to reverse all the fandom did to help me grow in that regard.

But on both of those things, there are also aspects that keep me going. I will say my family is a damned sight better about the gay thing now than they were in my teenage years! Part of it is that I’m not the only one in the family to fit under the queer spectrum (one of my cousins is a lesbian), but physical distance also doesn’t hurt that either. And as for the fandom, well, my support system in the fandom and the leather community has been so supportive that it overrode that incident significantly.

So now, I’m much more confident about my sexuality, and am proud to call myself a gay Latino furry. Still, as the old song goes, “don’t tell momma what you saw”…

FWG: How do you think being gay has inspired your stories?

Herr: A lot of times, I think of storytelling as being very therapeutic for me: Agundio Atti-Morales came when I was figuring out my relationship to God, family, and sexuality, my Colton and Darren stories are expressions of my joys and fears surrounding sexuality, Whip and Boot was very much a celebration of what I love about the leather community and what it did for my own identity…

…When you put it that way, I think it’s inspired quite a bit of my storytelling, really! And not in the least because of what protagonists I commonly write these days!

FWG: Do any of your stories feature leather or pup play?

Herr: My novel Whip and Boot is all about leather, and does include some of the kink involved with it! I haven’t written any fiction featuring pup play yet, and right now I don’t really have anything in the cards for that. I do have a chap book of poetry on the backburner about my friends in the Boston pet play scene, but I think I need to edit that a little more and try to add a couple more poems to it before I’m comfortable releasing it to the world. 

FWG: Do you feel like the issues that affect the outside world involving your identity affect your writing or publishing within the fandom or not?

Herr: My Agundio Atti-Morales stories were my therapy involving my identity as a gay Latino with a complicated relationship with his Catholicism, actually: the character and his family were conceived around the time I left Cleveland, and he ended up being the way I sorted out a lot of my feelings on sexuality, religion, and family. Outside of my sexuality, too, I have felt my writing affected by politics related to being a second-generation immigrant. One of my other FBA characters touched on this aspect of myself in the wake of Donald Trump’s election and what it would mean from an immigrant perspective.

FWG: Do you have favorite queer authors and has their literature affected your writing in the fandom?

Herr: I’m going to go with two answers, because I actually have very different answers to this.

For queer writers in general, I would say I’ve always loved the poetry of Federico García Lorca, because how do you have that kind of relationship with Salvador Dali and not find yourself on the queer spectrum somehow? His use of poetic image has been a pretty big influence on my poetry, but I haven’t graced the fandom with that yet so I can’t say it influenced my writing within it. My puppy chapbook idea that might fix that, though…

For queer writers specifically in the fandom, I have to go with Kyell Gold. It may sound like a standard answer, but he’s one of the most venerated furry authors working now for a reason! While I can’t say it’s affected my fiction in the fandom, I will say that one of my current backburner projects is an operatic adaptation of his novel Green Fairy, and it is one that I am hopeful I will have in a state to be workshopped by the end of the year!

FWG: If you could convince everyone to read a single book, what would it be?

Herr: This is going to stray so far away from queer writing that some folks will probably balk at it, but I would highly, highly recommend anyone interested in writing to pick up the Lexicon of Musical Invective, by Nicholas Slonimsky. It’s a collection of reviews of all the major composers, primarily the scathing reviews: if you need a dose of reality on how harsh some critics can be even to the greats, well, it’s a great book to have on your shelf! Also, old-timey critics have a gift with words that’s just indelible to witness.

FWG: Any last words for our readers and guild members?

Herr: Just wanted to take this moment to give a quick shout-out to queer opera, which is finding a foothold in the operatic repertory as of late. With operas like As One and Fellow Travellers finding a place in the modern operatic repertory, as well as companies commissioning operas like Wuorinen’s Brokeback Mountain and the Stonewall opera that premiered in last year’s New York City Opera season, it’s never a bad time to start looking into the world of how queer storytelling has started to permeate one of the oldest forms of theater in the world!

We would like to once again thank Herr Wozzeck for this fantastic interview! He can be found on FurAffinity, SoFurry, and Twitter @HerrWozzeck. You can also support him and his writing and musical works on Patreon. For more on his musical pursuits follow @TrioMenagerie on Twitter, or visit their Facebook page at Trio Menagerie. His newest book Whip and Boot from Bound Tales is currently available here.

We hope you enjoyed this spotlight as well as all of our other spotlights for Pride Month! We hope to keep featuring our members in the future. If you have ideas for a member spotlight, please contact our guild president Linnea “LiteralGrill” Capps. Until next time, may your words flow like water.

 

Welcome to another Furry Writers’ Guild spotlight for Pride Month! We’ve been so excited to share the viewpoints and stories of several of our guild members this month. Today we have an interview Madison “Makyo” Scott-Clary! Her pronouns are she/her. She is a transgender author, poet, programmer, and the editor-in-chief of Hybrid Ink. But why say more when she can tell you about herself? Let’s get right to the interview!

FWG: Tell the guild and our readers a bit about yourself.

Madison: I’m an author and editor living in the Pacific Northwest with my cat, my two dogs, and my husband who is also a dog. While I majored in music composition and work as a software engineer, I’ve been writing seriously for more than a decade. A lot of my work focuses specifically on queer folks, and often on exploring their lives in normal, comfortable situations – that is, genderqueer folks where their identity doesn’t define them, though it may influence the ways in which they interact with the world and vice versa. I also have a soft spot for metafurry works, where furries qua furries, rather than anthropomorphic characters, are at the heart of the story, as is perhaps obvious from my interaction with [adjective][species] in the past.

A lot of my writing is also defined by my identity as an ace trans woman and a polyamorous individual, and this crops up quite a bit in my writing. I can’t stop talking about it, really.

FWG: What is your favorite work that you have written?

Madison: Oh gosh, hmm. I think in terms of non-fiction, I wrote wrote a semiautobiographical work that took the form of a long, wandering website and book. In terms of fiction, while I’m fond of most of the pieces in the book, the story “Disappearance” in my collection Restless Town is probably my favorite, though I’ll be damned if I could tell you why. In terms of poetry, I wrote a cinquain ode called Growth that I’m very proud of.

FWG: What do you think makes a good story?

Madison: A good story should be emotionally impactful, have a consistent voice (or a well-reasoned and consistent change in voice throughout), and the characters should change throughout.

• Emotionally impactful — I don’t necessarily mean that every story should leave me crying, but that a story is best when it inspires an emotional reaction in me, something that inspires empathy. To rip off Winthrop, the characters and I should “rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together”.
• Consistent voice — One of the things that can turn me away from a work — novels especially — is a widely varying voice that leaves me liking some parts more than others, because it reduces cohesion. Voice need not be static, but if it is not, it should have a reason for its change. A good example of consistent tone is Frank Herbert’s Dune, which sets its tone immediately and sticks with it throughout. A good example of a well-used change in voice in a book is Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, which follow’s one character’s struggle with sanity through their prose and follows another character’s growing obsession through unique typography.
• Character growth — One thing that drives me bonkers about 90s/00s rom-coms (aside from the fact that 90% of them would be non-issues if the characters just talked with one another) is that the characters never grow or change. It’s usually the world changing such that they can suddenly wind up together. At most, the deuteragonists will change, and even then, it’s usually to disappear. A good counterexample would be Kevin Frane’s The Seventh Chakra in which both Arkady and Il-Hyeong both have well defined character arcs that leave them vastly different people than when they started.

FWG: How long have you been in the guild, and what changes have you seen with regards to how writing is handled since joining?

Madison: Oh gosh, since…2014? 2015? Hard to say! One of the big changes that I’ve seen within the guild as time has gone by is that it has gotten a lot more active along the writing front. When I joined, there was discussion about writing occasionally, and the coffeehouse chats were certainly a thing, but in a lot of senses, it felt more like a social gathering of like-minded folks than a guild. There’s no issue with that, to be sure, but I’m glad to see it heading in a direction more focused on craft and the growth of the individual members now.

FWG: You’re not only transgender and ace but also polyamorous! What kind of poly relationship do you find yourself in and what do you enjoy about polyamory?

Madison: As a loose believer in many of the tenets of relationship anarchy, my relationship structure is complicated and at times nebulous. I’m married, have a few partners, a datefriend, a power-dynamic influenced relationship, and several folks with whom I share a mutual fondness without necessarily being in a well-defined relationship. As the polycule has grown (we shall soon overtake Wyoming in terms of population, thanks to the Greater Seattle Postfurry Polycule), I have found myself more and more fascinated with various relationship structures and their rammifications. Probably the best thing about it is the feeling of compersion, that opposite of jealousy that goes along with seeing someone you love happy and complete in their life, even if it’s not necesarily with yourself. Just makes my little heart overflow.

FWG: What does Pride mean to you?

Madison: Pride goes beyond simply the opposite of shame, vanity, or celebration, but it is thoroughly enmeshed with a sense of community and with responsibility. When I was coming out to myself as trans, it was a halting and occasionally isolating process, and it wasn’t until I started interacting with more trans friends that I started to blossom. This is part of a psychological process called “mirroring”, when you see in others some aspect of yourself.

The moment at which I started to feel pride in my identity was the moment my partner somewhat jokingly referred to me as a “trans psychopomp” (someone who guides souls to their destination, such as Charon across the river Styx), and I realized that, at some point without me noticing, I became someone whom others would look to and see some aspects of themselves in. It came with a sense of weighty responsibility, but one that I was, yes, proud to take up.

FWG: Was there a bit of a journey or story to you uncovering your identity? If so, would you be comfortable sharing with us?

Madison: I mentioned character development and growth when it comes to what makes a good story, and I think that that also applies to our lives outside of fiction. My story of self-identification has its own arc, its own pitfalls and high points, and its own character development, even for those who were perhaps at one point seen as antagonists. At points, the act of transition was deliberate and considered to an almost fractal level of detail (my journey to starting HRT being a good example), while at times it was taken with a lightness of heart that seems almost maddening in retrospect. My journey to gender affirmation surgery began with a friend mentioning that they had surgery, me saying “holy shit, you can just do that?” and then calling up an office and scheduling a consult within a week. As a bit of self-promotion, I wrote extensively on the process in my most recent interactive-project-slash-book, ally, which is perhaps one of the things I have made of which I am most proud. I hope you’ll consider checking it out!

FWG: How do you think being transgender and polyamorous has inspired or affected your stories? Have you written transgender or polyamorous characters into your works?

Madison: I have come out probably five or six times throughout my life — gay, genderqueer, trans, polyam, ace, etc. — to the point where I’m all but convinced that life is the process of continually growing and coming out. This leads to an awful lot of dealing with the inherent coarseness of identity. After all, identity is psychopathological: we only feel identity when it is something that we struggle with (or, as mentioned above, something we see others struggling with.

Because of this, most if not all of my writing focuses on identity. I jokingly describe Restless Town as “sad queer furries in Idaho”, because just about every character in those stories is dealing with identity, many of them queer identities. Often this is taken as a given, since I really like stories in which minority identities are treated as No Big Deal, but it always plays some role. I’ve been told I write too much about gender, and been accused of writing parables, and you know what? I’m okay with that. It’s what’s important to me, and I think that it’s important to others as well.

FWG: You run and operate Hybrid Ink, do you think your identity has inspired what you choose to publish? If so, how so?

Madison: Hybrid Ink, as a publishing house, is explicitly focused on LGBTQIA+ stories. It’s in our tagline, in our mission statement, and in everything we focus on, so, not to be glib, but yes, and that’s very much the point!

FWG: Do you feel like the issues that affect the outside world involving your identity affect your writing or publishing within the fandom or not?

Madison: I struggled to answer this at first, as I would like to say that I am a flexible enough writer to be able to separate myself enough from my work, such that I can write any story. I really don’t think that’s totally true, though. As I’ve worked through my identity, and as I have seen it challenged politically and socially over the years, my writing has shifted drastically to this aforementioned need to show it normalized. There have been times when I have been tempted to take out my frustrations on my characters and write all sorts of horrible situations of them dealing with transphobia or the like, but every time I start a story like that, I immediately realize that that’s just not what I need. What I need is a bit of proof, however fictional, that happy queer people exist, and that this is okay.

FWG: Do you have favorite queer authors and has their literature affected your writing in the fandom?

Madison: Hmm! A few, I think, though with some of them, I don’t know their identities, but they have still written formative works. Jen Durbent, who wrote Hybrid Ink’s first publication, My Dinner With Andrea, is a pretty big inspiration for me. Ditto Blue Neufstifter/Azure Husky, whose microfiction works have often left me in awe. In terms of works, Max Gladwell and Amal El-Mohtar’s This Is How You Lose The Time War has had a huge influence on both my queer-writing-ness and personal style, and Hanne Blank’s Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality has very much influenced my non-fiction within this realm.

FWG: If you could convince everyone to read a single book, what would it be?

Madison: Aaargh, this is such a hard question! It probably changes by the month! Right now, I think it would be the aforementioned This Is How You Lose The Time War. That book wrecked me over and over again. Tore me up, spit me out, left me more whole than when I started. It’s scifi, but somehow manages to be so without being particularly “hard” or “soft”. It’s romance without being saccharine. The voice and style is just heartbreaking.

You’ll have to forgive me a pair of honorable mentions, but I hope you’ll understand the reason. I have been very much pushing that writers learn about their craft from media other than just the novel and the short story. Please, please, fellow writers, give graphic novels a go if nothing else. Both Nate Powell’s Swallow Me Whole and Craig Thomson’s Habibi similarly wrecked in in the best possible way.

FWG: Any last words for our readers and guild members?

Madison: You’re more important than you realize! I quoted John Winthrop earlier, and his words are well worth keeping in mind: “We must delight in each other, make each others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together — always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.” Keep up the good work, and keep on supporting each other!

Also: back up your work.

We would like to thank Madison once more for participating in this interview! You can keep up with Madison’s writing on her writing twitter @makyo_writes and her Mastodon. You can also support her on Patreon or Subscribestar. Finally, you can find her writing at makyo.ink and you can find Hybrid at hybrid.ink.

We hope you all enjoyed reading, be sure to stay tuned for our final Pride Month spotlight next week!

 

 

 

Welcome to another Furry Writers’ Guild spotlight for Pride Month! We’ve been so excited to share the viewpoints and stories of several of our guild members this month. Today we have an interview Hugo Jackson! Their pronouns are he/him or they/them. They are a non-binary author and has written three books so far in The Resonance Tetrology. But why say more when they can tell you about themself? Let’s get right to the interview!

FWG: Tell the guild and our readers a bit about yourself.

Hugo: Well, in furry circles I’m Archantael, a big and fluffy/scaly pangolin-fox hybrid, but in writing I go my professional name Hugo Jackson where I’m distinctly more fleshy. I’m 34, and probably the most distinct thing about me (from the point of view of me living in the US, anyway) is that I grew up in Britain, so my accent is British even though I’ve been here for over eight years now. I have been a published author since 2010 but have been an avid writer and slave to my overactive imagination since I was very very young. It’s been a great journey being able to embrace that, and it’s something I’m grateful for daily, not least of all because it brought me to the furry community and all of its amazing, sincere, colourful creatures and members.

FWG: What is your favourite work that you have written?

Hugo: Well, Legacy (my first novel) will always be the biggest milestone for me, not least of all because it’s the one I usually throw at people when I conjure up the bravery to actually sell my books to people, but Ruin’s Dawn, which is the third in the fantasy series, I feel had a real step up in my writing style and strength of voice, so that’s what I’m most proud of currently. It’s also the one I’ve been able to incorporate more of my personal views and experiences in the community, and myself, into, which makes it more personal through its unfolding.

FWG: What do you think makes a good story?

Hugo: I think anything sincere, written in your authentic voice, will make a good story. Obviously form and structure play a big part in making it readable and exciting in terms of pacing and suspense, but the best stories are the ones told without fear of condemnation for their sense of self-expression. Being bullied when I was younger, for a considerable amount of time, it became very easy for me to think ideas of fantasy or sci-fi were too much, and now I’m railing against that in my own work and in what I see in others’ stories. Make those superpowers and have your characters love whomever they feel most at ease with. Make a story completely yours, and you’re already well on the way to something good.

FWG: How long have you been in the guild, and what changes have you seen with regards to how writing is handled since joining?

Hugo: I think I joined back in 2013, just after Legacy was picked up by Inspired Quill. The membership requirements were fairly stringent back then, but given how much the self-publishing, indie, and Patreon markets have exploded in that time, the criteria for becoming a member have loosened a fair bit, and the availability for prospective writers to join via Telegram or Discord has made it more accessible for more people too. Writing and imagination aren’t things to be rationed to the elite- everyone deserves a fair chance at expressing themselves and achieving an ambition for the worlds that have grown within them, and I’ve loved seeing more people join in and take the chance to talk openly to other members about anything writing related, from story concepts to the actual publication process.

FWG: You are nonbinary correct? Can you explain what that means to you to the folks reading this interview?

Hugo: To me, being nonbinary is a multi-faceted identity. I mean, any identity is, gender or not, but particularly to me is the idea of breaking the barriers between gender conformity and expression. The idea that actually, we have always been more than we’re told we are, and that we can take hold of something more unique than we were promised.

Being nonbinary means so much to me because it describes the emotional parts of me I had trouble reconciling, the way I didn’t fit in when I was younger, the ways I wanted to embrace my identity and creativity when I was younger but wasn’t able to, especially where bullying led to self-consciousness or anxiety that made me hold myself back from so much of it until I met the furry community and I discovered more than I ever knew I didn’t know about what I could be.

FWG: You’re also pansexual! What does being pansexual mean to you?

Hugo: Essentially, and I know this varies from person to person, to me it’s the idea that anyone is attractive, no matter their gender. Some people claim this means you don’t acknowledge gender but to me it’s the exact opposite- I am aware of and embrace all identities I have the opportunity to meet and I can love and find them attractive all the same. The only things that will turn me off someone are aspects like bigotry, ignorance, hate, or mean-spirited nastiness. The TL;DR of it is, if you’re kind, you’re beautiful.

FWG: What does Pride mean to you?

Hugo: Oh wow, it’s so all-encompassing. It’s a celebration, an affirmation, a chance to connect with both a history and a future of gender identity and sexuality, the chance to try and come together to fight against oppressive conditioned behaviours from both outside and within ourselves and learn to love each other and ourselves more wholly, even if just a bit at a time. It’s a chance to find out who to protect, who to love, who to support and empower, and find those same things in others for ourselves.

FWG: Was there a bit of a journey or story to you uncovering your identity? If so, would you be comfortable sharing with us?

Hugo: I feel kind of boring, it was a fairly slow process for me. I had… well, I suppose there were many tell-tale signs as I was growing up and a few distinct experiences that should, had I been given the knowledge at the time, have told me that I was more than just ‘a straight boy’. Times when I embraced roleplaying a girl more readily than a male character, or when I had no issue whatsoever in my first stage role in high school wearing a big pink poofy dress. Or just… many other moments like that, getting a massive crush in a big way on a guy in my acting class (because holy crap he was beautiful). It wasn’t until after I found and really engaged with the furry community that the seeds of my identity began to propagate much more quickly, seeing the freedom of others’ self-expression, people who had fought for years to be who they are now, and finding kindredness and inspiration in them. They have inspired me in so many ways, and it’s something I’ll be eternally grateful for.

FWG: How do you think being nonbinary and pansexual has inspired or affected your stories? Have you written nonbinary or pansexual characters into your works?

Hugo: It has, if for no other reason than I want to represent something I don’t see in much media but I feel should desperately be shown more authentically. I see far more scope for a greater range of characters to interact with each other in different ways, and love more authentically. I wish I had known more about myself and the world even sooner, that I could have introduced more LGBTQIA+ characters into my Resonance books from the very beginning. As it is, I have a nonbinary character in Ruin’s Dawn, and a few characters in the series overall who I now know definitively are pansexual, and many other sexualities besides. Being as my books are young adult fiction, adult relationships don’t come into it that much, but sexuality and gender identity are still relevant to teenagers, so having nonbinary representation is super important.

FWG: Do you have favourite queer authors and has their literature affected your writing in the fandom?

Hugo: I actually read criminally little for being a novelist, I mostly devour graphic novels. Having said that, almost all of the graphic novels I read are by queer authors and artists- Noelle Stevenson, Rebecca Sugar, Molly Ostertag. Any queer author writing genuine rep and creating fantastical worlds is going to light the fires of my imagination, and encourage me to go even further in my own work.

FWG: If you could convince everyone to read a single book, what would it be?

Goodness, the one that comes to mind most for me (aside from knowing I’d love everyone to read mine someday), would be The Dark Portal by Robin Jarvis. It’s a younger teens book, but has incredible suspense, magic-wielding mice and demon cats in the sewers of London, so I feel there’s not much to go wrong with that.

FWG: Any last words for our readers and guild members?

Hugo: Your voice is unique in all the world. Don’t lose the chance to use it for good, for yourself or those around you, whether in fiction or in reality.

We would like to thank Hugo once more for participating in this interview! You can keep up with them by following them on Twitter and checking out their blog. Their books are available through Inspired Quill and the first chapter of Legacy, Book One, is available for free at https://www.inspired-quill.com/product/legacy If you want to hear them read that and a few other things, they also have a YouTube channel.

We hope you all enjoyed reading, be sure to stay tuned for another Pride Month spotlight next week!

Hello readers and welcome to our next Furry Writers’ Guild spotlight for Pride Month! Today we’ll be interviewing Den Leinir Turthra Jensen! Their pronouns are either they/them or it/its. We could tell you more about them, but why when they could do it themself? Let’s get to the interview!

FWG: Tell the guild and our readers a bit about yourself.

Leinir: I’m originally from Denmark, but moved to the UK about a decade ago, as my better half is from there and it was easier for me to relocate. We now live together with a good friend, and our pet two legged rat in a doer-upper bungalow in the English Midlands. Usually, I’m a pretty relaxed sort of person, and quite enjoy cooking a bit of food. Especially for people who enjoy it, which luckily is the case most of the time.

I’m not a full time writer, so my everyday thing is being sponsored to work on free and open source software, primarily in the KDE project, where I work primarily on the KNewStuff, Calligra Gemini, and Peruse projects. Recently, I also became involved with The Tail Company (guess what they make… no, not just tails, but yes, also those), for whom I maintain their Android app, for controlling their DIGITAiL and EarGear animatronic gear.

FWG: What is your favorite work that you have written?

Leinir: Oh no, the scary question! They’re my babies, I couldn’t possibly chose… One of my favourites, though not only for the story itself but also everything else surrounding it, is probably my story about a society where we have carnivores in a modern society very similar to our own, and the kind of effects that might have on society. It is set in a Denmark, where the first pack of wolves in over a century recently established themselves. That is to say, that has happened in our world, but it functions as the catalyst for the story as well. This story started out really just with that in mind, and without any proper plot behind it, the way most of my stories do.

What developed as I wrote was a bonding tale that made one beta reader tell me, whatever else I did to that story, to not change the ending as they thought it had made them a better person. If I never make another person think that, I will be contented to know that i at least made one person feel that way. The story, and the recipe that goes with it, can be found in The Furry Cookbook, which exists only as a frankly glorious hardcover version the creation of which I am proud to have been a small part.

FWG: What do you think makes a good story?

Leinir: Characters. Believable ones, with more depth than you encounter in the story itself. The ones that leave you wanting to know more, about them, and about their world. The ones who can keep a conversation that isn’t necessarily just for the plot.

FWG: How long have you been in the guild, and what changes have you seen with regards to how writing is handled since joining?

Leinir: I’m a brand spanking new member, with my actual membership proper less than a month old. I have, however, been hanging out in the guild spaces for several years now, and I have seen the guild go through a couple of series of changes. When I joined, the guild seemed in a little upheaval, and since then it has pulled itself together substantially. When I joined, it was really mostly to hang out with a bunch of people who also write, but what I found was not only friends, but encouragement and help with building skills that have come in more than a little handy since.

Until joining, I had no real desire or plans to attempt to write anything for publication, and here we are now, with several stories in a variety of anthologies, a small set of contributor copies on my shelf. Even a recipe to go with one of those stories, thanks to The Furry Cookbook I mentioned before.

FWG: You are agender correct? Can you explain what that means to you to the folks reading this interview?

Leinir: Certainly can! Usually, when describing this, I will just say that it means I don’t have a gender, but of course that is something of an oversimplification. Gender, it seems, is a case of multi-dimensional geometry. The simplistic view on it tends to be the idea that there is just one axis with male at one end and female the other, which at least on many companies’ websites sees to be interpreted as absolute values, so you can only pick one of those.

My own version, which also is a simplification, but which catches at least a fair bit more of the nuances of reality, is to have three axes: The male/female axis, to put you anywhere between the two. An inclusive/exclusive axis, which lets you suggest whether your position on the first axis is a mix of either extreme, or an absence of the one to which that position is nearest. And finally, the strength axis, which lets you position the strength of affiliation with the position on the first axis.

Given that bit of geometric fiddling about, for me, I fall fairly in the middle on the first axis, and on the second axis somewhere fairly near to the exclusive side, which puts me at more or less having an absence of gender, rather than having one. And then we get to the strength axis, which is where I feel occasionally like a bit of an impostor. Not in a terrible way, not really, but more because the strength of my gender identity is not particularly high.

What this means is that while i was born with male primary sexual characteristics, I do not really suffer very much from dysmorphia, or even dysphoria. That is to say, I would prefer not to have these things, but from there to actually being disgusted by them like some are, or it having any kind of effect in my day to day life outside of everybody calling me him a lot, it doesn’t affect me any great deal. That is not to say that it doesn’t have some semblance of effect, because of course it does – see for example my textual facepalming above about binary gender choices in random web registration forms and the like. It simply means that, really, for me, day to day, it is at most an inconvenience and a disappointment that the world is so stuck in a binary, when the real world is so much more fuzzy.

FWG: You’re also asexual! What part of the asexual spectrum do you fall under and what does that mean to you?

Leinir: This is a slightly more… new discovery in myself, so I’ve not thought as deeply about how to describe it as i have with my gender… But, with that in mind, there is a similar thing going on here with the axes, though I’m not sure how to label them. However, one thing that made me think I was not asexual in the past was that well, I do occasionally do the sexy stuff, and I do enjoy that when it happens. I greatly enjoy wearing slinky clothing, like spandex and the like, and I have been a rubberist for longer than i can remember. Rubber being, of course, one of those materials that seems to have all manner of sexual connections, with people having this funny idea that if you wear rubber, it’s a sex thing. For me, then, being asexual is not really a case of being repulsed by sex the way some are, or anything like that, rather for me it means that it is not something I desire, not something I seek out.

I am a highly tactile person, and those materials I mentioned earlier play into that. My entire thing is about hugs, cuddles, stroking, brushing and raking hair, that sort of thing, in that kind of way which means it could involve sex or not, and I really could care less about that. The same for the various aspects of kinkiness that you might encounter, like bondage, even vacuum beds: Everything that I actually do seek out, such as those things, are not sexual in any real way, they are, in effect, about comfort. They are about calm, relaxed pleasure. Nothing more, and nothing less. Sexytimes? Sure, that can be fun, I guess, but I just… don’t really care, i guess.

FWG: What does Pride mean to you?

Leinir: Pride to me means, well, a few different things.

For us, now, where we live, at least to a degree, it is mostly a celebration that we have for the most part arrived at a point where we are not discriminated against in any real kind of big way. There is more to be done, but this seems to be mostly a kind of reluctance to just remove legislation wholesale which has some semblance of reasoning, without having something more reasonable to replace it with. And I kind of get that. Blood donations for gay men, weird requirements about self identification, and other nonsensical things like that notwithstanding.

It also means fighting, and solidarity. We may well be sort of mostly okay where we are, but that does not mean it is like that for all. Pride for me, for us, is then also a way of showing our support for people who do not share the privilege we have for living in a country that at least tries to do these things with some semblance of humanity in mind. Where we are considered people.

With that in mind, it also means memory. It means that pride today, where we live, is remembering that those who came before us fought for our right to be who we are, without having to apologize or hide, without having to fear for our lives.

FWG: Was there a bit of a journey or story to you uncovering your identity? If so, would you be comfortable sharing with us? 

Leinir: Unlike the story told by so many, my journey has been a calm one, supported by those around me. Going through thinking I was bisexual, and even gay, and finally discovering that it is… not quite straightforward enough for that kind of labeling. Because what’s it called when your husband married someone they thought was male, because they didn’t really know any better at the time, and who doesn’t really seek out sex anyway? Gay doesn’t perhaps seem to fit that, but there’s not much in the way of terminology to match, and so queer, in its vagueness, kind of fits. But even that feels not entirely right, and so I simply keep discovering and learning. Maybe that is where my own little part of this huge journey is a little different: I do not feel these things strongly enough for it to be something that stops my life, and with those around me supporting me, it is much easier to explore it, and simply let the discoveries happen when they want to.

FWG: How do you think being agender and asexual has inspired or affected your stories? Have you written agender or asexual characters into your works?

Leinir: I imagine it must have a strong effect on my stories that I do not seek sexual gratification, and that I am tactility… if not obsessed then certainly attached. My stories tend to have a lot of affection in them, but while I have had a whole range of different types of relationships in them, they are never strongly seeking, they are never fiery passionate, not in the way that one might see them in a lot of popular work. Not even going so far as some of the various almost-porn (with which there really is nothing wrong, don’t @ me ), it just is not really something that tends to pop up in my mind as a motivation point for the characters.

Some of them certainly turn out to have desires, and those do get fulfilled – even if usually after fading out, or perhaps refused because motivation and no you don’t always get to have the thing – but it is usually a motivator in the story. I sometimes wonder if this reduces the scopes of what stories i can tell, but also, as such motivations don’t really work for me as a person, I would feel uncomfortable trying to work them in. It would feel, perhaps, a little disingenuous. In other words: Yes, my asexuality has most certainly affected my writing, and being agender means I have, well, a few characters with either entirely unspecified gender, or explicitly no gender, and a bunch of varieties on that whole handwavy thing.

FWG: Do you feel like the issues that affect the outside world involving your identity affect your writing within the fandom or not?

Leinir: Frankly i am not sure. The parts of my writing which are, I guess, sociopolitical in nature tend to focus on other things than sexuality and gender identity, and for those it rather has a tendency to sneak in, because, well, in my head there just isn’t anything wrong with it. That is not to say no conflicts arise, because they do, but it tends to not really be a main motivational factor for any antagonist, or even protagonist, it just is a thing which is there.

In my less deliberately commenting work, conversely, it does seem to sneak in more often. Not so much the gender related ones, but rather the asexuality ones I mentioned just before; the hugs, just casual cuddling and contact. With the social distancing that is currently so front and center (and likely will be with us for a very long time, and rightly so), it feels like maybe I need to think very carefully about how to frame that in the future.

FWG: If you could convince everyone to read a single book, what would it be?

Leinir: Well, that is a question and a bit! A couple spring to mind, I’m sorry, I cannot do only the one.

One being the Helliconia Trilogy by Brian W. Aldiss, which was my first proper entry into serious, highly conceptual sci fi. The thing is nearly as old as I am, but that doesn’t stop it from being the thing which made my young mind go all funny with idea. That it is also the book I was reading when our house burnt down in 1995 might have had some effect in cementing it in my mind (and no, that was a long time ago, we’re all out the other side and all we lost was belongings, everybody was safe, including the animals).

The other book is The 40,000 At Gehenna, by C J Cherryh, which is not as religious a book as the title suggests. It is, without going into it too deeply, a story about a colony of artificially grown and, effectively, hypnotically programmed humans who were in essence dumped on a newly discovered planet and, due to some social upheaval at the other end of their supply lines, ended up having to fend for themselves on a world where life already existed before they landed. The programming included some base stipulations to ensure they would love and take care of that world, and the book explores what that means and how that kind of broadly termed instruction might be interpreted.

Finally, I will mention that i am right now utterly engrossed in a book by fellow FWG member, JFR Coates, whose space stoats and the immense hardships they live through in Reborn and the sequel Traitor are currently bringing me as close to tears as anything has for a long time. I am not yet through book two yet, and already hunger to spend more time in this world, and consequently am delighted to know there is a third book on the way. It is astonishing, and if you haven’t grabbed copies yet already, you absolutely, definitely should go and do so right now. Perhaps finish reading the interview first, but definitely go and grab that.

FWG: Any last words for our readers and guild members?

Leinir: You should be immensely proud of the wonderful, supporting place that is the Furry Writers’ Guild, and furry in general. When I joined in the late 90s, this was a much maligned community, which mostly just ignored the trite commentary by others about these weirdos and their fluffy or otherwise animal things with human type stuff also going on. As time passed, I got to watch, and experience in person, how this evolved into one of the most welcoming and aware communities out there.

When the internet went insane and people realized just how prevalent, shall we just say certain political thoughts, were, we were able to look around, frown, and be a bit confused, all the while the world outside praised us for being the one place that had really not allowed that lot to spend any amount of time with us outside of a few, scattered, and decidedly tiny and unwelcome parts. It is a wonderful thing. Be proud. Furry or not, just the fact you made it to here means you have some interest, and have at least some awareness of that fact.

We would like to thank Leinir again for this wonderful interview! You can find a list of their published works on their Goodreads account and follow them on Mastodon. Stay tuned for next week when we feature another member of the guild for pride! Until we meet again, may your words flow like water.

 

 

Hello readers and welcome to the first of many Furry Writers’ Guild spotlights for Pride Month! Today we’ll be interviewing Al Song! His pronouns are he/him/his. He has been published in such anthologies as Fang 8, Roar 9, Tales from the Guild: World Tour, The Furry Cookbook, Foxers or Beariefs, Sensory De-Tails, Howloween, and Difursity. As it was also Asian Pacific American Heritage Month just a few days prior, we want to present this interview as an intersectional look a Pride alongside Asian Heritage. So what are we waiting for, let’s dive in!

FWG: Tell the guild and our readers a bit about yourself.

Al Song: I’m a gay red kangaroo living near the caffeine-fueled city of Seattle. My parents are refugees from Laos, and they had me while they lived in Hawaii. I majored in German Studies and Comparative Literature when I was in college. I also took some French, Japanese, and Italian courses, since I fell in love with learning new languages. Culturally speaking, I’m a vegetarian charcuterie board of various foods that seem like they typically shouldn’t belong together. At least it always gives me something new to write about. I typically write and read queer slice of life romance and am editor or such works at Thurston Howl Publications. My other artistic love is music, which is another topic I truly enjoy writing about. Between fretboards and keyboards my fingers probably don’t like me very much.  

Off topic, but I love escape rooms. I’ve done forty of them, and they never get tiring.

FWG: What is your favorite work that you have written?

Al Song: “Rekindling” in Difursity is definitely a story I hold close to my heart. I put a lot of my identities and struggles into that short story. The protagonist is a gay, Laotian-American college student, and the story discusses the intersectionality of being both gay and Asian-American along with some issues my family and I have been through. 

“Serenity in Blue” in Fang volume 8 is another story I’m proud of, since it’s the first story I ever published, and Fang is the first furry anthology I read when I was in college. This story discusses the struggles of life after graduating from college in the modern world, along with the big topics of queerness and mental health, which are subjects that unfortunately are not often discussed in Lao culture. 

When it comes to both of these stories I wanted to bring up things that are rarely discussed and brought to light. Despite all the heaviness, these stories also contain romance and love. I’ve set out to expose audiences to new perspectives identities, while also trying to show those who have been pushed down that there can be hope out there. 

FWG: What do you think makes a good story?

Al Song: If a story makes a lasting impact (typically a positive one) in my mind, then it’s usually a pretty good one. I’ve read short comics, poems and have listened to songs with concise stories that have left me with more profound thoughts and emotions than some novel series or even shows that lasted multiple seasons. If it’s been a few years, and I’m still thinking about a story, then it’s done something right. I’m not talking about stories that have left me with a bad impression or have triggered me and won’t leave my memory banks. I typically read YA, romance, and slice of life novels that take place in the present, so when a book or short story can stand out amongst all the other books in a positive manner, then I’ll know it was worth my time. If it can also give me a smile when I think about it, then it gets bonus points.

FWG: How long have you been in the guild, and what changes have you seen with regards to how writing is handled since joining?

Al Song: I’ve been in the guild for about two years or so, but I’ve been following it for much longer, since I have friends and peers in within the guild. It feels like there are more opportunities and places to submit stories, and there are more and more diverse voices in the guild itself, which is definitely important. It also seems like there are even more opportunities to learn from one another in the guild.

FWG: What does your Asian Heritage mean to you?

Al Song: It means a lot to me, since it’s shaped my life and its experiences in so many different ways. Being born and raised in the US with a Laotian background has its challenges, but I would never trade my ability to speak Lao for another language or trade my culture in for another one. When I grew up I wished that I could just be like everyone else, but I realized that my identities are incredibly important. I’ve been exposed to so much good food, music, and people who have built me up and helped me through life. It also seems like many people within the US don’t know anything about Laos. I recently had to explain to someone where Laos is located and that Lao is a language. It gives me a chance to teach people something new about the world and broaden their horizons. 

Unfortunately, being both gay and Lao-American can make things more difficult than they need to be. I don’t feel like very many people in queer circles can understand what I go through as an Asian-American, and in Lao spheres queerness is usually a taboo topic, so it feels like I can’t really discuss it with my family. The toughest thing is that I usually don’t feel like I have a place where I can truly belong. Despite all of this I think my identities have helped me become more empathetic with others and what they go through, since I’m always a fish out of water.

FWG: How has being gay affected or inspired the stories you write? Have you written gay characters into your stories?

Al Song: So far I’ve exclusively written queer characters as protagonists, since I’m gay, and there are just so many stories featuring straight protagonists and characters out there, and I want my readers to be able to see parts of themselves within my characters and what they go through, and I want them to be able to ship characters without having to make them queer, since they’re already queer characters. There have been so many times I wished a series or a novel I really enjoyed had more queer representation, so I wanted go out and make that happen.

FWG: How about your heritage? Does it and your gay identity ever mix in terms of inspiration for your stories?

Al Song: Most of my protagonists are Lao-American and Gay. This intersection is probably one of the biggest topics I talk about. Not many people will know what it’s like, and I definitely want to get that experience out there, especially through such a fun medium. Furry editors I’ve worked with have mostly reacted positively to this less common perspective. It’s not often you read about queer Asian-Americans in literature, and whenever I see these characters portrayed positively it definitely brings a smile to my face. Even though I’m focused on creating stories for other queer folk and people of color, I also want my stories to resonate with those who don’t share my identities as well. I write about universal things like rejection, creative struggles, and love, but giving the stories a gay and Asian twist seems to help them show a unique perspective. I’ve taken a lot of my personal experiences as a gay man along with my Laotian heritage and have put them into my stories, because I do want to make a positive impact and to show others like me that we’re not alone in this world.

FWG: Do you feel like the issues that affect the outside world involving your identity or heritage affect your writing within the fandom or not?

Al Song: Definitely, the mainstream media could really do a better job with representation of both Asian-Americans and queer characters, since there’s a huge lack of both identities in TV and film, and as much as I love YA novels it’s not that often that I get to see queer people of color as protagonists. Sometimes we do see a character who is gay or Asian, then they end up becoming a side character and it makes me even sadder when they get all the stereotypes applied to them. In my stories I want to undo this and to show off characters who share my identities in a positive manner.

FWG: What kinds of intersectional issues have you had to deal with while being a gay Asian author? What would you like people to know about these issues and how could they help to improve to make these less to deal with?

Al Song: I’ve been around a lot of authors who think they can just write whatever they want about a marginalized group or identity that the author doesn’t share without any consultations. I understand that this is a heated topic, so let’s talk about music for a second. It’s very cringeworthy to see an actor play an instrument incorrectly on the screen, and if you’re going to write technical aspects of a musical performance or the life of a musician, then please do your research and reach out to some musicians and have them look over your work. Violin bows need to be rosined, and fretboards and fingerboards are different things. There have been times when I’ve read a musical description and felt a lot disappointment and realized the author probably wasn’t a musician. If you’re going to talk about a group of people who don’t share your identities, and you don’t want to look foolish, then maybe you should reach out. 

Unfortunately, within the fandom I’ve seen Asian characters not always presented in a great light. I’ve read stories where we’ve been heavily stereotyped and speak in broken English, ones where we become exoticized and fetishized, and at times we get shown in a negative light as the antagonist. Sometimes it’s a combination of these things. It’s definitely disheartening to see this happen within the fandom, since it’s a place I love so much. For some reason explaining to people that I don’t want someone to be attracted to me because of my race is more confusing than an AP Calculus class. It would be nice to have more writers and editors who are cognizant of this when they’re crafting stories and are publishing them. Telling someone that their lived experience is incorrect is definitely not helpful. The same thing applies to straight people who write queer characters. At least reach out to someone.

FWG: Do you have favorite Asian and/or queer authors and has their literature affected your writing in the fandom?

Al Song: Shawn Wong is probably my favorite Asian author, since he was also my intermediate prose instructor at the University of Washington. He taught me so much about the importance of writing a story with a message, along with his own struggles as an Asian-American writer with immigrant parents. He really shaped my understanding of what stories are along with how to have a more critical view of them. He also helped me realize that writing about my issues and experiences is extremely crucial, and that those things shouldn’t be hidden. One of my favorite gay authors is David Levithan. After reading Will Grayson, Will Grayson during my senior year of high school I was inspired to write similar slice of life gay romance stories that also dealt with mental health. The novel was so sad and funny, and it just made me so happy. This made me want to create joy in the hearts of those who read my stories. 

FWG: If you could convince everyone to read a single book, what would it be?

Al Song: “Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel,” by Sara Farizan. It’s a smart and hilarious YA novel about being a nerdy, young, queer, person of color, with immigrant parents in modern day America. I got to meet the author while I was a student librarian at the Q Center of the University of Washington. She gave me some of the best advice that I continue to follow today when it comes to writing. This was during a time when I had some people tell me that I was writing too much about music and romance, so she pretty much told me to keep writing about those things if it’s what I love doing. Thanks to her advice I’ve been published in multiple anthologies. 

FWG: Any last words for our readers and guild members?

Al Song: Honest art is something I really enjoy, and it’s been the thing that’s helped me garner a modicum of success when it comes to writing in the fandom. I definitely write what I know, and I’m sure most people know a good amount about themselves along with the issues they’ve been through. Every person is different and unique, so when we each put ourselves into our art it allows us to shine and stand out. It’s definitely understandable that vulnerability is a tough and scary thing, but between putting ourselves and our works out there, dealing with rejection, and facing heart-rending critiques; vulnerability is at the forefront of all of this. It can be used to strengthen us and our creativity. As cliché as it sounds, maybe you should just be your true self.

We would like to thank Al once again for this interview! If you’d like to follow him or his works you can do so on Twitter @song_roo, or on his FurAffinity page or SoFurry page. Stay tuned for next week when we feature another member of the guild for pride! Until we meet again, may your words flow like water.

Hello there FWG members! For those of you that have been with us for a long time, you will be excited to hear that we are bringing back the monthly newsletters! For those newer to the guild, we once produced monthly newsletters to tell people about things like new open markets and guild news. We’re hoping to bring this back to give all our members information to help them thrive while writing anthropomorphic fiction!

First it’s been a very busy month for the guild. We updated our website, got a new logo, opened up a new Discord channel, updated our membership listings, and voted on new by-laws and a new code of conduct. With all of our listing updates, we are showing 114 active members! We’ll keep accepting any updates as they come in, but we’re happy so many of you got the form filled out fast.

The vote to implement our new by-laws and code of conduct passed with over a 90% majority of members, so these will now be put into place. You can now see them on our website. With this in mind, this opens up several new officer positions within the guild. If you might be interested in becoming our Public Relations Officer, Markets Manager, or potentially the Cóyotl Awards Chair, please get in contact with a guild officer so we can talk to you!

Speaking of the Cóyotl Awards, where are they? We did hold our vote for the 2019 awards and have the results tallied. Issues with the current Covid 19 pandemic have made getting our normal supplies for our special coyote trophies a bit difficult as well as makes sending them out to winners tough. We are considering a special awards stream for the winners hopefully very soon and we promise to keep you posted.

If you haven’t joined the new official FWG Discord, you’re missing out on a lot of fun. One of the new features on the Discord is our special beta reading program, so we would like to spotlight Rockie Thiger (@Thiger on Discord) for providing the most beta reads for fellow authors this month! If you’d like to learn more about this new program or simply jump into the conversation come join us on Discord.

We would also like to welcome the newest members of our guild: Rockie Thiger, David “Ryft Sarri” Yenser, Resolute, Stacy Bender / P.C. Hatter, Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Jensyn Grayves, Metassus, and Herr Wozzeck! We are very excited to have these wonderful writers join our ranks.

In honor of Asian Pacific Heritage Month, we interviewed FWG member Allison Thai! You can find that full interview here. We’ll also be featuring some authors during Pride Month on the blog, so keep an eye out!

One last bit of guild business, we would like to remind our members about our Microfiction Monday initiative. Any writer, non-members included, that can write a Tweet sized story has the opportunity to have it featured on our Twitter! You can learn more about the program and how to submit here.

Several new books have been released over the last couple of months including:

• Furry Haiku edited by Thurston Howl
• Whip and Boot by Herr Wozzeck
• The Complete Dragonsbane Saga by Ian Madison Keller
• Gruesome Games: Howlers Volume 3 Edited by Thurston Howl
• Purgatorio: The Ten Regions Of Furry Purgatory Edited by Weasel
• Species: Wildcats edited by KC Alpinus, 
• Difursity: Stories by Furries of Color edited by Weasel

Goal Publications also has two novels available for pre-order now including:

• Ritual of the Ancients by Ian Madison Keller
• When a Cat Loves a Dog by Mary E. Lowd

We want to express some particular excitement for Awoo, Who’s This? Coming from Bound Tales, this special anthology features members of the Furry Writers’ Guild trying to write in the style of other members. Funds from this anthology go to help the guild so consider giving it a look!

Part of our website update was making our Furry Writers’ Market better than ever before! You can find all of open markets for furry writing we can track down here: https://furrywritersguild.com/furry-writers-market/

Currently, these anthology markets are open:

• The Furry Gameshow Network (Deadline: July 10, 2020)
• Leave The Lights On (Deadline: July 20, 2020)
• Dread Volume 2. (Deadline: August 7, 2020)
• 1921: Furries In Fedoras (Deadline: October 31, 2020)
• Reclamation Project: Year Two (Deadline: October 31, 2020)
• Electric Sewer 2: Boogie Nights (Deadline: December 1, 2020)

Consider checking out our page for details and writing up a story for one of these awesome anthologies!

We know there’s been a lot going on lately, but we hope the guild can keep working together to keep making this an awesome space for all of our members. If you have any ideas for special programs we could work on, be sure to let us know! We have more projects around the corner that we’re very excited to show off when they are ready. Stay safe all of you wonderful furry writers!

– FWG President Linnea “LiteralGrill” Capps

It’s May, and in honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month we wanted to feature one of our authors with Asian heritage within the Furry Writers’ Guild. We interviewed Allison Thai who has been featured in publications such as Zooscape, Infurno: The Nine Circles of Hell, and ROAR Volume 8. Without further ado, let’s get to the interview.

 

FWG: Tell the guild and our readers a bit about yourself.

Allison: I am the oldest daughter of Vietnam War refugees. My first taste in animal stories came from the Redwall and Warriors series. Though my fursona is a husky, according to Vietnamese myth I’m actually a fairy-dragon hybrid. No, I didn’t make that up. The Vietnamese creation story claims that the Vietnamese people are descended from a dragon lord and a fairy queen—con rồng cháu tiên: children of the dragon, grandchildren of gods. Pretty rad, huh?

FWG: What is your favorite work that you have written?

Allison: “In the Name of Science,” featured in Thurston Howl Publication’s Infurno anthology. It’s historical fiction set in WWII Japan, based on Unit 731 and written in the form of logs from a young ermine surgeon, who gradually becomes disillusioned and disgusted by the work she’s doing. Writing this story let me grapple with the horrifying reality that Japan had conducted covert human experiments upon other Asian groups. Giving this dark piece of our history an anthro twist doesn’t make the inhumanity of it any less.

On a lighter note, I absolutely love how THP went all out with the presentation of this hellish-themed anthology: black pages, white font, interludes to show the fates of characters who’ve committed sins. THP took a step further with my story: using cursive and courier fonts to reflect the alternation between my protagonist’s personal writings and her more objective, detached recordings of atrocities she took part in.

This was certainly no joy ride to write, and I came out disturbed by this story that I had pulled from the darkest, deepest recess of my mind. Still, I’m proud and grateful to have written it. What I hope to achieve with “In the Name of Science” is to raise awareness of an event sometimes known as the Asian Holocaust—not talked about as much as its Western counterpart—and share with the reader what scares me the most: not fictional monstrosities, but how man is capable of being the cruelest creature.

FWG: What do you think makes a good story?

Allison: I need to have characters who are grounded in reality, and a character arc I can resonate with and root for. Readers can suspend their disbelief and accept fantastical things like sentient spaceships, schools of wizardry, superhero societies, talking animals, etc., but if there are no believable, relatable characters, that’s when a reader like me puts down the book. The protagonist doesn’t have to be necessarily likeable, but plausibility and authenticity in the voice, personality, and drive is a must for me. I’m also a sucker for beautiful style, poetic prose, and poignant, succinct turns of phrase.

FWG: How long have you been in the guild, and what changes have you seen with regards to how writing is handled since joining?

Allison: I have been in the guild since 2016. Since then, I’ve learned a lot from being among other furry writers on how to approach worldbuilding and characterization specifically for furry stories. I appreciate that aspect of the guild and the furry writing community very much. Though I’m not entrenched in guild management, nor have I been at the helm of any anthro project, I’ve seen attempts to advocate the recognition and merit of furry literature, from the existence of things like Furry Book Review to the much-needed arrival of Zooscape, a new anthro magazine created and run by Mary E. Lowd. (I have a story there, by the way, a novelette on Arctic foxes in Iceland, and had the most fun writing it!)

As someone who has one foot in the furry writing community, and the other in the genre/SFF/speculative fiction community, I’m seeing the gap between them grow smaller and smaller as, for example, my fellow writers who normally stay behind the spec fic circle begin submitting and publishing their work in Zooscape. I look forward to a future of more overlap among the writing communities, and building enough readership and resources to get furry literature sold and published at professional paying rates.

FWG: What does your Asian Heritage mean to you?

Allison: It’s an important part of me, and will always be a part of me, but my awareness and acknowledgement of it comes and goes like a tidal wave. Sometimes, like when I go about my Americanized daily life, or I’m too occupied with studying or working, I don’t think much of it. Other times, though, thrust it from the periphery to the forefront. Those other times have been, among other things, Lunar New Year, or attending Vietnamese church with my parents, or the surge in anti-Asian sentiment during the coronavirus pandemic.

Being born and raised in Houston, I take it for granted that I had grown up in the largest Vietnamese-American population outside of California. Only when I travel outside of Texas, outside of Houston even, do I become very aware of how scarce Asians are in many other areas. I’m comfortable with my identity and wouldn’t want to trade it for anything else. While my Asian heritage is an important part of me, that’s not all there is to me.

FWG: Do you feel like the issues that affect the outside world affect your writing within the fandom or not?

Allison: COVID-19 is the prevailing issue I’m sure that’s on everyone’s minds lately! So far I haven’t written anything in response to the pandemic. I did, however, write a (non-furry) Russian plague doctor story 2 years before this COVID-19 mess came down. As someone studying to join the medical profession, this issue is close to my heart. The clinical setting, the people who work there, and the kind of work they do are familiar elements that I often return to in my stories. Given my experience of working in the ER, sometimes I wonder what an ER run by animals for animals would look like. Currently I have my sights set on writing a long-ish furry ER story this summer.

FWG: Do you have favorite Asian authors and has their literature affected your writing in the fandom?

Allison: Ken Liu, who’s Chinese-American, and Aliette de Bodard, who’s Vietnamese-French. What I admire most about their work is the incredible range they explore. Ken Liu is a versatile writer whose prose shines in whatever genre and topic he dabbles in. In addition to stories inspired by Vietnamese and Chinese culture, Aliette de Bodard has written Aztec alternative history.

All of that gives me inspiration and courage not to pigeon-hole myself into writing only Asian stories. I know that choice to write only from your background or not is a very, intensely personal and meaningful one for POCs, and there’s no right or wrong in going about it. Again, it’s a choice. But for me? I’d find writing only what I know to be restrictive, and quite frankly, boring. I don’t want to write about Vietnam and Vietnamese characters ALL the time. I wouldn’t enjoy that. I’m a highly curious creature and fascinated by all sorts of things. Norse mythology and Russian history are among those interests. I like that writing gives me the freedom to explore lands, cultures, and stories beyond my own experience. 

FWG: If you could convince everyone to read a single book, what would it be?

Allison: I’d probably have to point to the book that most recently made me cry: The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra. No, it’s not furry, not even speculative fiction, but I recommend that writers should have a wide range and balance in their reading, and I recommend this book nonetheless. Lifting words from a review I had written for it a while ago: “Anthony Marra has a way with words and storytelling that frames and captures a vivid, bleak landscape of northern industrial Russia, and paints in a cast of characters whose triumphs and tragedies I resonated with as if they were my own. A myriad of relationships are explored, strengthened, and broken. Brotherhood transcends time, space, and the ruthless oppression of the Soviet Union. Romances spark, ignite, flicker, and fade.

Regardless of your preference for novels or short stories, I believe The Tsar of Love and Techno is the best of both worlds by delivering the poignant snapshots of short stories while interconnecting them to impart the satisfaction of a full-fledged novel. Characters come back in ways you don’t expect and their arcs come in full circle, all revolving around a mysterious, obscure Russian painting. This is definitely a book you’d want to revisit to connect the dots and pick up details you had missed before.”

Tell the guild where it can find you, to follow you and read your works!

I had dug out a neat little den for myself on Twitter as @ThaiSibir. As for my list of published short fiction (many of them in furry anthologies), you can find that on my website: 

FWG: Any last words for our readers and guild members?

Hold on to your love and passion for writing. When the payments and publications have great chances of not coming your way (because, let’s be real here, rejection’s the name of the writing game), what else do you have? To keep at this writing business, remember to have fun and write for yourself first. Everything else comes second.

 

You can find a list of Allison’s published short fiction on her website as well as follow her on Twitter @ThaiSibir. We hope you found this interview exciting and informative! If you have suggestions for future highlights and interviews, please contact our public relations officer here. Until next time: may your words flow like water.

Hello again Furry Writers’ Guild members! We have allowed discussions to take place surrounding our previously suggested by-laws and code of conduct on the forums as planned and taken time after to formulate our newly suggested changes based on member feedback. With this in mind, it’s time to bring this to a vote! A link to the voting form will be included at the end of this blog post. Let’s get to it shall we?

We wish to bring to a vote an update to our by-laws. You can view our current by-laws >here. We discussed why they needed updating in our previous post. The amended by-laws being brought up for vote can be found >here. All changes are highlighted in red.

We also wish to strengthen our Code of Conduct. Our current Code of Conduct can be found >here. Based on suggestions from our members we have made the following changes:

• Made an Unacceptable Conduct section with specific wording to protect subjects discussed in works of fiction
• Removed specific language that looked to be policing kinks
• Better detailed the process for filing complaints

We would like to offer a general content warning as some of these things listed in the Unacceptable Conduct section might be triggers for some within our community. >The full listing, alongside the changes we wish to make to the Code of Conduct can be found here. Changes to the Code of Conduct are highlighted in red.

We would now like to bring these amendments up for a vote! Voting will remain open for two weeks, from May 16th through May 30th. The link below will take you to the official voting form.

>FWG By-Laws And Code of Conduct Voting Form

Thank you again so much to all the FWG members that provided feedback and to everyone voting on these proposals. We’ll have an announcement on the results out to you all once the voting period is over.

Today, May 3rd, the FWG administration announced a series of proposed changes for which the membership was to hold a vote. It was soon made apparent that we had overlooked some significant details and that discussion and restructuring of the proposals would have to take place.

In accordance with this realization, we hereby announce a discussion period during which the finer points of the proposals may be analyzed with the care they deserve. This period will extend through May 9th, during which time all FWG members are invited to share their thoughts and concerns. A new vote will be held thereafter. Official discussion will be taking place >in this thread on our forums.

We apologize for the hasty rollout and thank you for your understanding. We look forward to hearing from you.